Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Chapter 15

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then

(00:22):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm,
or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason,
this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday haul.

(00:53):
Get decorations from the home depots CVS and more through Instacart,
and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders service.
In terms ofpply.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Walden by Henry David Thoro, Chapter fifteen, Winter Animals. When
the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new
and shorter roots to many points, but new views from
their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I

(01:22):
crossed Flint's Pond after it was covered with snow, though
I had often paddled about and skated over it, it
was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could
think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln Hills rose
up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain
in which I did not remember to have stood before,

(01:46):
And the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice,
moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers
or eskimo, or in misty weather, loomed like fabulous creatures,
and I did not know whether they were giants or pigmies.

(02:07):
I took this course when I went to lecture in
Lincoln in the evening, traveling in no road and passing
no house between my own hut and the lecture room
in Goose Pond, which lay in my way. A colony
of muskrats dwelt and raised their cabins high above the ice,
though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.

(02:29):
Walden being like the rest, usually bare of snow, or
with only 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
village street, and except at very long intervals from the

(02:51):
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,

(03:11):
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,

(03:35):
I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without
hearing it. Hoo hoo, hoo, hoo hoo sounded sonorously, and
the first three syllables accented a somewhat like how der
do or sometimes hoo hoo. Only one night, in the

(04:01):
beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock,
I was startled by the loud honking of a goose,
and stepped 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, seemingly deterred from settling by my light there commodore,

(04:27):
honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly, 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

(04:49):
Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of
voice in a native and boohoo him out of concord horizon.
What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this
time of night? Consecrated to me. Do you think I
am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that

(05:12):
I have not got lungs and alarnics as well as yourself.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Woo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard,
And yet if you had a discriminating year, there were
in it the elements of a concord, such as these
planes never saw nor heard. I also heard the whooping
of the ice in the pond, my great bedfellow in

(05:42):
that part of concord, as if it were restless in
its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency,
and had dreams. Or I was waked by the cracking
of the ground by the frost, as if some one
had driven a team against my and in the morning

(06:02):
would find a crack in the earth a quarter of
a mile long and a third of an inch wide.
Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the
snow crust in moonlight nights in search of a partridge
or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally, like forest dogs,

(06:23):
as if laboring with some anxiety or seeking expression, struggling
for light and to be dogs outright and run freely
in the streets. For if we take the ages into
our account, may there not be a civilization going on
among brutes as well as men. They seemed to me

(06:45):
to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defense,
awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window,
attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me,
and then retreated. Usually the red squirrel Siurius Hodsonius waked

(07:12):
me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up
and down the sides of the house, as if sent
out of the woods for this purpose. In the course
of the winter, I threw out half a bushel of
ears of sweet corn, which had not got ripe, on
to the snow crust by my door, and was amused
by watching the motions of the various animals which were

(07:33):
baited by it. In the twilight and the night. The
rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long,
the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much
entertainment by their maneuvers. One would approach at first warily
through the shrub oaks, running over the snow crust by

(07:53):
fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind.
Now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and
waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his trotters, as
if it were for a wager. And now as many
paces that way, but never getting on more than half

(08:14):
a rod at a time, and then suddenly pausing with
a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all
the eyes in the universe were eyed on him. For
all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most
solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as

(08:35):
those of a dancing girl, wasting more time and delay
and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance.
I never saw one walk. And then suddenly, before you
could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top
of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and
chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquising and talking to all the

(09:00):
universe at the same time, for no reason that I
could ever detect, or he himself was aware of. I
suspect at length he would reach the corn, and, selecting
a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonymmetrical
way to the topmost stick of my woodpile before my window,

(09:22):
where he looked me in the face, And there sit
for hours, supplying himself with a new ear, from time
to time, nibbling at first voraciously, and throwing the half
naked cobs about, till at length he grew more dainty still,
and played with his food, tasting only the inside of

(09:42):
the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over
the stick by one paw, slipping from his careless grasp,
and fell to the ground when he would look over
at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if
suspecting that it had had life, with a mind not
made up whether to get it again or a new one,

(10:05):
or be off now thinking of corn, then listening to
hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent
fellow would waste many an year in a forenoon, till
at last, seizing some longer and plumper one considerably bigger
than himself, and skillfully balancing it, he would set out

(10:28):
with it to the woods like a tiger with a buffalo,
by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along
with it as if it were too heavy for him,
and falling, all the while making its fall a diagonal
between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it
through at any rate a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow.

(10:56):
And so he would get off with it to where
he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a
pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would
afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard
long before, as they were warily making their approach an

(11:19):
eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and
sneaking manner, they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer,
and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then,
sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow
in their haste a kernel which is too big for

(11:39):
their throats and chokes them, And after great labor, they
disgorge it and spend an hour in the endeavor to
crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were
manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them.
But the squirrels, though at first shy when to work,

(12:00):
as if they were taking what was their own. Meanwhile,
also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the
crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and,
placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with
their little bills as if it were an insect in

(12:21):
the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats.
A little flock of these tit mice came daily to
pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs
at my door, with faint, flitting, lisping notes like the
tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly

(12:43):
day day day, or more rarely, in spring like days,
a wiry summery phoebe from the woodside. They were so
familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of
wood where which I was carrying in, and pecked at
the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow a

(13:06):
light upon my shoulder for a moment while I was
hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I
was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have
been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels
also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally

(13:26):
stepped upon my shoe when that was the nearest way,
when the ground was not yet quite covered. And again
near the end of winter, when the snow was melted.
On my south hill side and about my woodpile, the
partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to
feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods, the

(13:49):
partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from
the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting
down the sunbeams like golden dust. For this brave bird
is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently

(14:09):
covered up by drifts, and it is said sometimes plunges
from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains
concealed for a day or two. I used to start
them in.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
The Holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they
are so you don't have to go from room to
room to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who
should get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes
for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and

(14:45):
then share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart
app and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes,
plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service
fees and terms apply.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm,
or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason,
this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday hall.

(15:17):
Get decorations from the home depots, CBS and more through
instacart and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders.
Service fees in terms ofpply and the.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Open land also where they had come out of the
woods at sunset to bud the wild apple trees, they
will come regularly every evening to particular trees where the
cunning sportsman lies and wait for them, And the distant
orchards next the woods suffer. Thus not a little I

(15:47):
am glad that the partridge gets fed at any rate.
It is nature's own bird which lives on buds and
diet drink. In dark winter morning or in short winter afternoons,
I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the

(16:08):
woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the
instinct of the chase and the note of the hunting
horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear.
The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth
on to the open level of the pond, nor following

(16:29):
pack pursuing their actaeon and perhaps at evening, I see
the hunters returning with a single brush, trailing from their
sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me
that if the fox would remain in the bosom of
the frozen earth, he would be safe, or if be

(16:52):
would run in a straight line away, no foxhound could
overtake him. But having left his pursuers far behind, he
stop to rest and listen till they come up. And
when he runs, he circles round to his old haunts,
where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run
upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far

(17:14):
to one side, and he appears to know that water
will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that
he once saw fox pursued by hounds, burst out onto walden,
when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part
way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere

(17:35):
long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent.
Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door
and circle round my house and yelp and hound without
regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness,
so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus

(17:56):
they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of
a fog. For a wise hound will forsake everything else
for this. One day a man came to my hut
from Lexington to inquire after his hound, that made a
large track and had been hunting for a week by himself.
But I fear that he was not the wiser for

(18:17):
all I told him, for every time I attempted to
answer his questions, he interrupted me by asking what do
you do here? He had lost a dog, but found
a man, one old hunter who has a dry tongue,
who used to come to bathe in Walden once every
year when the water was warmest, and at such times

(18:39):
looked in upon me, told me that many years ago.
He took his gun one afternoon and went out for
a cruise in Walden Wood. And as he walked the
Wayland road, he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and
ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road,
and as quick as thought leaped the other out of

(19:00):
the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him.
Some way behind came an old hound and her three
pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own accord, and
disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as
he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden

(19:21):
he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward
fair Haven, still pursuing the fox. And on they came
their hounding cry, which made all the woods ring, sounding
nearer and nearer, now from well Meadow, now from the
Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still and

(19:42):
listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear,
when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with
an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a
sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still keeping the round,

(20:03):
leaving his pursuers far behind, and leaping upon a rock
amid the woods. He sat erect and listening, with his
back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the
latter's arm, but that was a short lived mood, and
as quick as thought can follow thought, his piece was leveled,

(20:25):
and whang, the fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead
on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and
listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now
the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their
demoniac cry. At length, the old hound burst into view,

(20:49):
with muzzle to the ground and snapping the air as
if possessed, and ran directly to the rock. But spying
the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if
struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him
in silence, And one by one her pupps arrived, and,

(21:13):
like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery.
Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst,
and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while
he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile and
at length turned off into the woods again. That evening,

(21:33):
a western squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to
inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week
they had been hunting on their own account from Weston Woods.
The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered
him the skin, but the other declined it and departed.
He did not find his hounds that night, but the

(21:55):
next day learned that they had crossed the river and
put up at a farm house for the night, whence,
having been well fed, they took their departure early in
the morning. The hunter who told me this could remember
one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on fair
Haven ledges and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village,

(22:17):
who told him even that he had seen a moose there.
Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne. He pronounced it Bogeen,
which my informant used to borrow in the wast book
of an old trader of this town who was also

(22:38):
a captain, town clerk and representative. I find the following
entry January eighteenth, seventeen forty two forty three John Melvin,
credited by one gray fox zero two three. They are
not now found here. And in his ledge February seventh,

(23:01):
seventeen forty three, Hezekiah Stratton has credit by one half
a cat skin zero one four plus, of course a
wild cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the Old
French War and would not have got credit for hunting

(23:24):
less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also,
and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the
horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity,
and another has told me the particulars of the hunt
in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly

(23:45):
a numerous and merry crew. Here. I remember well one
gaunt nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the
roadside and play a strain on it. Wilder and more melodious,
if my memory serves me, then any hunting horn. At
midnight when there was a moon, I sometimes met with

(24:07):
hounds in my path, prowling about the woods, which would
skulk out of my way, as if afraid and stand
silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and
wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were
scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to

(24:28):
four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice
the previous winter, a Norwegian winter for them, for the
snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to
mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet.
These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and
many of them had grown afoot, though completely girdled. But

(24:52):
after another winter such were, without exception dead. It is
remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a
whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of
up and down it. But perhaps it is necessary in
order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow
up densely. The hares Lepus americanus were very familiar. One

(25:20):
had her form under my house all winter, separated from
me only by the flooring, and she startled me each
morning by her hasty departure. When I began to stir, thump, thump, thump,
striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry.
They used to come round my door at dusk to
nibble the potato pairings which I had thrown out, and

(25:43):
were so nearly the color of the ground that they
could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight,
I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless
under my window. When I opened my door in the
evening off they would go with a square in a
bounce near at hand. They only excited my pity. One

(26:06):
evening one sat by my door two paces from me,
at first, trembling with fear yet unwilling to move. A
poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and
sharp nose, scant tail, and slender paws. It looked as

(26:26):
if nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods,
but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared
young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step and
lo away its scud with an elastic spring over the

(26:47):
snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length,
and soon put the forest between me and itself. The
wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of nature,
not without reason was its slenderness, such then was its

(27:11):
nature lepis levipis lightfoot. Methinks, what is a country without
rabbits and partridges. They are among the most simple and
indigenous animal products, ancient and venerable families known to antiquity,

(27:32):
as to modern times of the very hue and substance
of nature nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,
and to one another. It is either winged or it
is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen
a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away,

(27:54):
only unnatural one as much to be expected as rustling leaves.
The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive,
like true natives of the soil. Whatever revolutions occur. If
the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which

(28:15):
spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous
than ever. That must be a poor country, indeed, that
does not support a hair our woods team with them
both and around every swamp may be seen the partridge
or rabbit walk be set with twiggy fences and horse

(28:38):
hair snares, which some cowboy tends end of chapter fifteen.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart. Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman did a may get through
the snowstorm, or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever
the reason, this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their

(29:07):
whole holiday hall. Get decorations from the home depots, cvs
and more through instacart and enjoy free delivery on your
first three orders. Service fees in terms apply.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then

(29:39):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes, plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.