In these midwinter days, how muffled is the earth in its immaculate
raiment, so disguised in whiteness that familiar places are strange,
rough hollows smoothed to mere undulations, deceitful to the eye and
feet, and level fields so piled with heaps and ridges that their owners
scarcely recognize them. The hovel is as regally roofed as the palace,
the rudest fence is a hedge of pearl, finer than a wall of marble, and
the meanest wayside weed is a white flower of fairyland.
The woods, which frost and November winds stripped of their leafy
thatch, are roofed again, now with an arabesque of alabaster more
delicate than the green canopy that summer unfolded, and all the floor
is set in noiseless pavement, traced with a shifting pattern of blue
shadows. In these silent aisles the echoes are smothered at their
birth. There is no response of airy voices to the faint call of the
winter birds. The sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther than the
pungent fragrance of the smoke that drifts in a blue haze from the
chopper's fire. The report of the gun awakes no answering report, and
each mellow note of the hound comes separate to the ear, with no jangle
of reverberations.
Fox and hound wallow through the snow a crumbling furrow that
obliterates identity of either trail, yet there are tracks that tell as
plain as written words who made them. Here have fallen, lightly as
snowflakes, the broad pads of the hare, white as the snow he trod;
there, the parallel tracks of another winter masker, the weasel, and
those of the squirrel, linking tree to tree. The leaps of a tiny
wood-mouse are lightly marked upon the feathery surface to where there
is the imprint of a light, swift pinion on either side, and the little
story of his wandering ends--one crimson blood drop the period that
marks the finis.
In the blue shadow at the bottom of that winding furrow are the dainty
footprints of a grouse, and you wonder why he, so strong of wing,
should choose to wade laboriously the clogging snow even in his briefest
trip, rather than make his easy way through the unresisting air, and the
snow-written record of his wayward wanderings tells not why. Suddenly,
as if a mine had been sprung where your next footstep should fall and
with almost as startling, though harmless effect, another of his wild
tribe bursts upward through the unmarked white floor and goes whirring
and clattering away, scattering in powdery ruin the maze of delicate
tracery the snowfall wrought; and vanishes, leaving only an aerial
pathway of naked twigs to mark his impetuous passage.
In the twilight of an evergreen thicket sits a great horned owl like a
hermit in his cell in pious contemplation of his own holiness and the
world's wickedness. But this recluse hates not sin, only daylight and
mankind. Out in the fields you may find the white-robed brother of this
gray friar, a pilgrim from the far north, brooding in the very face of
the sun, on some stack or outlying barn, but he will not suffer you to
come so near to him as will this solemn anchorite who stares at you
unmoved as a graven image till you come within the very shadows of his
roof.
Marsh and channel are scarcely distinguishable now but by the white
domes of the muskrats' winter homes and here and there a sprawling
thicket or button bush, for the rank growth of weeds is beaten flat, and
the deep snow covers it and the channel ice in one unbroken sheet.
Champlain's sheltered bays and coves are frozen and white with snow or
frost, and the open water, whether still or storm-tossed, black beneath
clouds or bluer than the blue dome that arches it, looks as cold as ice
and snow. Sometimes its steaming breath lies close above it, sometimes
mounts in swaying, lofty columns to the sky, but always cold and
ghostly, without expression of warmth or life.
So far away to hoary peaks that shine with a glittering gleam against
the blue rim of the sky, or to the furthest bluegray line of woodland
that borders the horizon, stretches the universal whiteness, so coldly
shines the sun from the low curve of his course, and so chilly comes the
lightest waft of wind from wheresoever it listeth, that it tasks the
imagination to picture any land on all the earth where spring is just
awakening fresh life, or where summer dwells amid green leaves and
bright flowers, the music of birds and running waters, and of warm waves
on pleasant shores, or autumn yet lingers in the gorgeousness of many
hues. How far off beyond this world seems the possibility of such
seasons, how enduring and relentless this which encompasses us.
And then, at the close of the brief white day, the sunset paints a
promise and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the sky. The gray clouds
kindle with red and yellow fire that burns about their purple hearts in
tints of infinite variety, while behind them and the dark blue rampart
of the mountains flames the last glory of the departing sun, fading in a
tint of tender green to the upper blue. Even the cold snow at our feet
flushes with warm color, and the eastern hills blush roseate against
the climbing, darkening shadow of the earth.
It is as if some land of summer whose brightness has never been told lay
unveiled before us, its delectable mountains splendid with innumerable
hues, its lakes and streams of gold rippling to purple shores seeming
not so far before us but that we might, by a little journey, come to
them.