Let us suppose that a heavy snow has fallen and that we have been
a-birding in vain. For once it seems as if all the birds had gone the way
of the butterflies. But we are not true bird-lovers unless we can
substitute nature for bird whenever the occasion demands; specialisation
is only for the ultra-scientist.
There is more to be learned in a snowy field than volumes could tell.
There is the tangle of footprints to unravel, the history of the pastimes
and foragings and tragedies of the past night writ large and unmistakable.
Though the sun now shines brightly, we can well imagine the cold darkness
of six hours ago; we can reconstruct the whole scene from those tiny
tracks, showing frantic leaps, the indentation of two wing-tips,--a speck
of blood. But let us take a bird's-eye view of things, from a bird's-head
height; that is, lie flat upon a board or upon the clean, dry crystals and
see what wonders we have passed by all our lives.
Take twenty square feet of snow with a streamlet through the centre, and
we have an epitome of geological processes and conditions. With chin upon
mittens and mittens upon the crust, the eye opens upon a new world. The
half-covered rivulet becomes a monster glacier-fed stream, rushing down
through grand canyons and caves, hung with icy stalactites. Bit by bit the
walls are undermined and massive icebergs become detached and are whirled
away. As for moraines, we have them in plenty; only the windrows of
thousands upon thousands of tiny seeds of which they are composed, are not
permanent, but change their form and position with every strong gust of
wind. And with every gust too their numbers increase, the harvest of the
weeds being garnered here, upon barren ground. No wonder the stream will
be hidden from view next summer, when the myriad seeds sprout and begin to
fight upward for light and air.
If we cannot hope for polar bears to complete our Arctic scene, we may
thrill at the sight of a sinuous weasel, winding his way among the weeds;
and if we look in vain for swans, we at least may rejoice in a whirling,
white flock of snow buntings.
A few flakes fall gently upon our sleeve and another world opens before
us. A small hand-lens will be of service, although sharp eyes may dispense
with it. Gather a few recently fallen flakes upon a piece of black cloth,
and the lens will reveal jewels more beautiful than any ever fashioned by
the hand of man. Six-pointed crystals, always hexagonal, of a myriad
patterns, leave us lost in wonderment when we look out over the white
landscape and think of the hidden beauty of it all. The largest glacier of
Greenland or Alaska is composed wholly of just such crystals whose points
have melted and which have become ice.
We may draw or photograph scores of these beautiful crystals and never
duplicate a figure. Some are almost solid and tabular, others are simple
stars or fern-branched. Then we may detect compound forms, crystals within
crystals, and, rarest of all, doubles, where two different forms appear as
joined together by a tiny pillar. In all of these we have an epitome of
the crystals of the rocks beneath our feet, only in their case the
pressure has moulded them into straight columns, while the snow, forming
unhindered in midair, resolves itself into these exquisite forms and
floral designs. Flowers and rocks are not so very unlike after all.
Few of us can observe these wonderful forms without feeling the poetry of
it all. Thoreau on the fifth day of January, 1856, writes as follows:...
"The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists
of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes as on the
13th of December, but thin and partly transparent crystals. They are about
one tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes,
without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like,
with a distinct, straight, slender midrib raying from the centre. On each
side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade with a crenate
edge. How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are
generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my
coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a
snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coarse,
neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. Soon the storm increases (it was already
very severe to face), and the snow becomes finer, more white and powdery.
"Who knows but this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that, when
I observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just
generated in the low mist next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the
snow, its primal auroral, and golden hour of infancy; commonly the flakes
reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively, without order or
beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the
circumstances under which this occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving
storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is falling. It comes
almost horizontally from the north.... A divinity must have stirred within
them, before the crystals did thus shoot and set: wheels of the storm
chariots. The same law that shapes the earth and the stars shapes the
snowflake. Call it rather snow star. As surely as the petals of a flower
are numbered, each of these countless snow stars comes whirling to earth,
pronouncing thus with emphasis the number six, order, [Greek: cosmos].
This was the beginning of a storm which reached far and wide, and
elsewhere was more severe than here. On the Saskatchewan, where no man of
science is present to behold, still down they come, and not the less
fulfil their destiny, perchance melt at once on the Indian's face. What a
world we live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the
most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller's coat, the observant
and the unobservant, on the restless squirrel's fur, on the far-stretching
fields and forests, the wooded dells and the mountain tops. Far, far away
from the haunts of men, they roll down some little slope, fall over and
come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the mass, ready
anon to swell some little rill with their contribution, and so, at last,
the universal ocean from which they came. There they lie, like the wreck
of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse
shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his ball, or
the woodman's sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the
sweepings of heaven's floor. And they all sing, melting as they sing, of
the mysteries of the number six; six, six, six. He takes up the waters of
the sea in his hand, leaving the salt; he disperses it in mist through the
skies; he re-collects and sprinkles it like grain in six-rayed snowy stars
over the earth, there to lie till he dissolves its bonds again."
But here is a bit of snow which seems less pure, with grayish patches here
and there. Down again to sparrow-level and bring the glass to bear. Your
farmer friend will tell you that they are snow-fleas which are snowed down
with the flakes; the entomologist will call them _Achorutes nivicola_ and
he knows that they have prosaically wiggled their way from the crevices of
bark on the nearest tree-trunk. One's thrill of pleasure at this
unexpected discovery will lead one to adopt sparrow-views whenever larger
game is lacking.
I walked erstwhile upon thy frozen waves,
And heard the streams amid thy ice-locked caves;
I peered down thy crevasses blue and dim,
Standing in awe upon the dizzy rim.
Beyond me lay the inlet still and blue,
Behind, the mountains loomed upon the view
Like storm-wraiths gathered from the low-hung sky.
A gust of wind swept past with heavy sigh,
And lo! I listened to the ice-stream's song
Of winter when the nights grow dark and long,
And bright stars flash above thy fields of snow,
The cold waste sparkling in the pallid glow.
Charles Keeler.