Pine Branch

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 (Creator)

March 18, 1857

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Accompanying Journal Entry: "9 A.M. -- Up Assabet. A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain. I now again hear the song sparrowís tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard or two. The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside. I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking driftwood -- logs and baords, etc. -- out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with. He says that the frost is not out so that he can lay wall, and se he thought he[ëd] go and see what there was at Fair Haven. Says that when you hear a woodpeckerís rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. While Emerson sits writing [in] his study this still, overcast, moist day, Goodwin is paddling up the still, dark river. Emerson burns twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen (?) tons of coal; Goodwin perhaps a cord and a half, much of which he picks out of the river. He says heíd rather have a boat leak some for fishing. I hear the report of his gun from time time for an hour, heralding the death of a muskrat and reverberating far down the river. Goodwin had just seen Melvin disappearing up the North River, and I turn up thither after him. The ice-belt still clings to the bank on each side, a foot or more above the water, and is now fringed with icicles of various lengths, only an inch or two apart, where it is melting by day and dripping into the river. Being distinctly reflected, you think you see two, two feet apart, the water-line not being seen. I land and walk half-way up the hill. A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock. The reindeer lichens on the pitch pine plain are moist and flaccid. I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines, a pair of them, one answering to the other, as it were like a vibrating watch-spring. Then, at a distance, that whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all i suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker. And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, -- probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree. Also I hear the chill-lill or tchit-a-tchit of the slate-colored sparrow, and see it. On the pitch pine plain, nearly the whole of a small turtleís egg, by the side of its excavated nest. Save with my boat the dead top of (apparently) a pine, divested of its bark and bleached. Before the bark fell off it was curiously etched by worms in variously curved lines and half-circles often with regular short recurving branches, thus: PËre Buteux, going on commission to the AttikamËgues in 1651, describes a fall away up there, where a river falls into a sort of trough or cradle a hundred paces long. ìIn this cradle the river boils (bouillonne) in such a fashion, that if you cast a stick (baston) into ti, it remains some time without appearing, than all at once it elevates itself (il síÈlËve en haut) to the height of two pikes, at forty or fifty paces from the place where you cast it in. It is observed that in the old deed of the Hunt farm, written in 1701, though the whole, consisting of something more than one hundred and fifty acres, is minutely described in thirteen different pieces, no part is described as woodlandor wood-lot, only one piece as partly unimproved. This shoes show little account was made of wood. Mr. Nathan Brooks reminds me that not till recently, i.e. not till within forty years, have wood-lots begun to be taxed for anything like their full value."

Journal XXII (1856-09-07 to 1857-04-01)

plantae
trees
pine
branch

PJ11

M1302:28

TIX