ey passed over the pond toward Fair
Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore
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 Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of
voice in a native, and boo-hoo 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 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. And yet, if you
had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord
such as these plains never saw nor heard.

I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in
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 door, and in the morning 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, 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 to be rudimental, burrowing men, still
standing on their defence, 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 (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked 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 baited by it. In the twilight and the
night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty me