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; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable 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 or pygmies. I took this course when I
went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, traveling in no road and
passing no house between my 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.
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 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, 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. I
seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing; _Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo_, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented
somewhat like _how der do_; or sometimes _hoo hoo_ only. One night in
the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock,
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 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 voi