and but five or six inches deep, you
may give chase and come up with the fox on foot." Evidently Thoreau
had never tried it. With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the
ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might force a fox to take to
his hole, but you would not come up to him. In four or five feet of
soft snow hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their backs for
amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever ventures out in such a depth
of snow. In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of
the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by
the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early
tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of
the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!

Again, his mysterious "night warbler," to which he so often alludes,
was one of our common everyday birds which most school-children know,
namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to Thoreau it was a sort
of phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson
told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should
have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped
identifying the bird is a puzzle.

In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the
song of the hermit thrush from that of the wood thrush. The melody,
no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough. Though he sauntered
through orchards and rested under apple trees, he never observed that
the rings of small holes in the bark were usually made by the
yellow-bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and that the bird was
not searching for grubs or insects, but was feeding upon the milky
cambium layer of the inner bark.

But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have called attention to
count as nothing against the rich harvest of natural-history notes
with which his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs and animal
behavior and give these things their right emphasis in the life of the
landscape as no other New England writer has done. His account of the
battle of the ants in Walden atones an hundred-fold for the lapses I
have mentioned.

One wonders just what Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in
telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in
the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum
of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling