Winter. Dallas Lore Sharp
CHAPTER XIII
ILLUSTRATIONS
| The Fox Sparrows’ Bath | Frontispiece |
| Skunk Tracks | 3 |
| Cat Tracks | 4 |
| Tracks of Hare joined by Dogs | 6 |
| “In a burst of speed across the open field” | 7 |
| Dog Tracks in Four Inches of Snow | 7 |
| Tracks of the White-Footed Mouse | 9 |
| “A gray squirrel with a red squirrel at his heels” | 11 |
| Fox Tracks | 12 |
| Muskrat Trail | 14 |
| “Into the air they went” | 26 |
| White-Foot—“In the winter gales” | 33 |
| “Five wee mice” | 35 |
| White-Foot and the Hickory-Nuts | 38 |
| A Vireo’s Nest in Winter | 40 |
| “Wind-sweepings” | 41 |
| ’Possum in the Persimmon Tree | 50 |
| Weasel—“Watching me from between the sticks” | 58 |
| “A chickadee!” | 62 |
| “Doing the excavating themselves” | 69 |
| Food for the Nuthatches | 76 |
| The Mourning-Cloak Butterfly, an Early Flitter | 77 |
| A Ruffed Grouse Trail | 78 |
| “The snow had melted from the river meadows” | 80 |
| “Carrying a big bob-tailed vole out of my ‘mowing’” | 85 |
| “Scurrying through the tops of some pitch pines” | 90 |
| “All the afternoon the crows have been going over” | 93 |
| The Duck-billed Platypus, or Duck-Bill | 97 |
| The Echidna, or Porcupine Ant-Eater | 98 |
| “Standing before a large ’possum” | 99 |
| “Out she spilled and nine little ’possums with her” | 100 |
| “A great blue heron would beat ponderously across” | 106 |
| Meadow Mouse—“In a drifting catbird’s nest” | 109 |
| “A little figure in yellow oil-skins” | 114 |
| “Drew a limp little form out of the water” | 121 |
| Quail—“One of the covey calling the flock together” | 127 |
| “A flock of robins dashing into the cedars” | 131 |
| Pussy-Willows and Watercress | 132 |
| “The hazelnut bushes are in bloom” | 133 |
| Bluebird—“Like a bit of summer sky” | 135 |
INTRODUCTION
As in The Fall of the Year, so here in Winter, the second volume of this series, I have tried by story and sketch and suggestion to catch the spirit of the season. In this volume it is the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter which I would catch, the bitter boreal might that, out of doors, drives all before it; that challenges all that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us, till the bounding red blood belts us like an equator, and the glow of all the tropics blooms upon our faces and down into the inmost of our beings.
Winter within us means vitality and purpose and throbbing life; and without us in our fields and woods it means widened prospect, the storm of battle, the holiness of peace, the poetry of silence and darkness and emptiness and death. And I have tried throughout this volume to show that Winter is only a symbol, that death is only an appearance, that life is everywhere, and that everywhere life dominates even while it lies buried under the winding-sheet of the snow.
“A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
What should it know of death?”
Why, this at least, that the winter world is not dead; that the cold is powerless to destroy; that life flees and hides and