IV

IT IS the full midwinter, the season of snow, ear-tingling cold, and skies into whose blue the earth reflects back its own intensity of light. It is not heat but light which is returning to the world, and so glittering is the morning air and so cloudless the sky that the sun rolls up over the eastern woods like a sudden miracle of radiant gold, borrowing no red from the lower atmosphere.

No sound is more characteristic of this leafless time than the cries of blue jays from the nearer woods and the trees and buildings of the farm. Again and again, when I am busy out of doors, I hear that single screaming call across the wilderness of snow. I hear it just as the austere shadows of winter are coming to life with the sunrise, I hear it, and hear it answered, through the bright hollow of high noon. There is as yet no touch of spring in the note; it is the familiar harsh call and nothing more. Yet to us on the farms it is music for it means that life in the air, daring, vigorous, and even jocular, is sharing the winter with us, and has not fled from us before the deep bitterness of cold.

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I do not see many blue jays as I work in summer in the fields. Avoiding the vicinity of the house and our nearer trees, they set up housekeeping in such hardwood areas as have grown up between old pasture land and the pines. Every old farm in the region has such groves of maple, oak, and beech. From such a vantage, they forage the outer fields and their own preferred woodland, seldom, if ever, going down into the deep evergreen forest. It is the more simple-minded flicker who goes into the hemlocks and pines, and only too often do I find in forest openings the woeful heap of brownish and yellow feathers which mark a tragedy for one creature and a dinner for the other.

With the lengthening of autumn, the jays forsake their summer haunts and move down closer to the farms. It is then that one sees them in some near-by apple tree, hopping about with that fine, vigorous jump they know how to manage. Towards the end of the year, the birds again wander away. I rarely see or hear them during January. But with February and the return of the light comes the flash of blue, and a first salute to the earth and the sun reborn.

Yesterday afternoon, while calling on a neighbor, I saw by his barn a sight I look for every year. He had been shaking hay down from his lofts, and had then taken his broom, and swept the chaff and hay-dust out upon the snow. The day was the very quintessence of the winter, a time of pure, universal blue and pure, universal white. In the full sunlight and the snow, my neighbor’s neighbors had come to share the bounty of the barn. Five vigorous and gaudy jays were flying back and forth between a bit of fence rail adjoining the barn and the chaff-covered snow, a wonderful sight to see from scarcely ten feet away.

On the snow itself, prospecting and frisking in the chaff, their heads lowered, their bushy tails twitching, were two grey squirrels. Sometimes the jays and squirrels, grey fur and blue feathers all in company, were gathered together on the ground. Only once did I see the jays fly in a group to the fence top, and that was when the old farm cat passed them on her way into the barn. I could not see that she paid the slightest attention to the guests.

Ornithologists are given to scolding the jay, and accusing him of piratical behavior. We do not have the magpie in the east, but the jay is a close relative, and it is apt to be a rather mischievous family. But who could really be angry, and at such a time, with so handsome, “rugged,” and American a bird? In a few weeks I should be hearing the spring note, that really musical and plaintive call which will mark the turning of the first corner of the year.

FARM DIARY

Yesterday in the cold and solitary winter twilight, I came upon a yoke of Holstein steers hauling an unloaded lumber sledge through the deep snow. Their driver, a middle-aged man, walked beside them in the dusk, all three pushing their way ahead along the unbroken road. / Every year the frost “heaves” the kitchen ell up about an inch and a half, the actual ell sliding up the fixed chimney like a ring on a finger. One latch no longer closes properly, and I shall have to readjust it. / From a sky full of sunshine but veiled to the west with a mere gauze of cloud descends the smallest snow I have ever seen, snow tiny as the dust of mica people buy to scatter on Christmas trees. It is falling with a brilliant and rather artificial twinkle through the sunlit air. / Elizabeth says that during the recent snowstorm, some half a dozen redpolls were perched on the tall weed stalks to the lee of the barn.

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The secret of snow is the beauty of the curve. In no other manifestation of Nature is the curve revealed in an almost abstract purity as a part of the visible mystery and splendor of the world. What I think of, as I set down these lines, is the intense and almost glowing line which a great dune of snow lifts against the blue radiance of the morning after a storm, that high, clear, and incomparable crest which is mathematics and magic, snow and the wind. How many times have I paused to stare at such a summit when I have found it barring my way at a turn of the unploughed country road! It is when winds are strong, temperatures low, and the snow almost powder dry that you will see such monuments of winter at their best. Dunes of sand obey the same complex of laws, but the heavier sand does not have the aerial grace of the bodiless and radiant crystal which builds the snow against the sky.