When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new
and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces
of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flints Pond,
after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and
skated over it, it was so uedly wide and se that I
could think of nothing but Baffins Bay. The Lin hills rose up
arou the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not
remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an
ierminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their
wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather
loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were
giants mies. I took this course when I went to lecture in
Lin in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house
between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay
in my way, a y of muskrats dwelt, and raised their s high
above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.
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 fio their streets. There, far from
the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the
jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard
well trodden, by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with
snow or bristling with icicles.
For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard
the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far;
such a sound as the frozeh 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. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without
hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the
first three syllables ated somewhat like how der do; or
sometimes hoo, hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter,
before the pond froze over, about nine oclock, I was startled by
the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping 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, their odore
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, respo regular
intervals to the goose, as if determio expose and disgrace this
intruder from Hudsons Bay by exhibiting a greater pass and
volume of voi a native, and boo-hoo him out of cord horizon.
What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night
secrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at su
hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as
yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most
thrilling discords I ever heard. A, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a cord such
as these plains never saw nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the