VI

A STRONG and almost sandy crust has surfaced over the wintry countryside of snow. For three and even four steps, it bears one’s weight like a white floor, and then, alas, it cracks, and one plunges through almost to the knee. As it is too glassy to be comfortable under snowshoes, and one cannot walk with much ease, we keep to our ploughed roads and shoveled paths and make the best of it. Held in its bright tension by the cold, and little troubled by the wind, the vast and shining floor is not without its own interest. For one thing, it is on such a surface that one can observe the shadows of winter which are unlike all other shadows of the year.

Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.

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The shadows of winter are astronomical. What moves them is the diurnal motion of the sun. The leafless tree may shudder through its boughs, and its higher twigs and small branches sway a little to and fro, but of that gaunt and rigid motion only a ghost of movement trembles on the snow beneath. Tree-trunk and tree shape, the bird house and its pole, the chimney with its ceaseless smoke, the dead and nodding goldenrod—the life of their shadows comes with sunrise and with sunset dies. All day long beneath these winter suns, each austere and simplified image slides glancingly from west to east with the slow and ordained progress of the dial shadow on the wall.

Today having been spent outdoors from early morning to the close of afternoon, it is these shadows I have been watching on the hardened snow. They seem to me one of the most characteristic features of the winter, and I wonder that so little is said about them by dwellers in the country.

Today’s tree shadows began with the image long, aslant, and blurred. The clearer and more definite shadow-image is always near the trunk, close, that is, to the object by which the shadow is cast. At noon, I thought, there came the maximum of definition. The sun is still rather low, and the shadow reached out from the tree much more than it would in June. As the afternoon lengthened, the shadows of the higher branches, always a little blurred, grew more indistinct, leaning to the east. The whole image died away on the snow in the winter twilight smouldering in the cloud-haze to the west.

I have not the painter’s eye, but I could see that the shadows were blue even as the painters show them and that the blue varied in intensity. That night, I went out awhile to watch the moon shadows which again are astronomical, and thought certain aspects of the tree images perhaps more definite than those I had seen by day.

The moon is now very high. Utterly silent, the huge landscape, glazed with the moon, rolled on under the heavens, the shadows foreshortened and falling due north. It might have been the phantom of a summer day.

FARM DIARY

Monday before sunrise, and the windows glazed with ferns and opaque mysteries of ice, all turning a glowing crystalline rose as the hidden sun clears the tree tops to the east. / Across the west field from somewhere in the forest comes the sound of the axe, the blows falling rhythmic, heavy, and dully wooden across the frozen air. / On a glorious day after a light snow, “Mrs. B.” and I have a winter picnic on the shore of the pond, our cooking fire burning on the top of a great rock just emerging from last week’s drifts, the flame blown furiously by capfuls of the northwest wind; temperature six above. / On a grey and steely day, with snow clouds lowering, a great, steel-colored truck comes rolling along over the pond to where three men are busy cutting ice—the worked area marked off by little bushy firs. / Have received from Denver, Colo., a fine warm pair of western-style long pants made from government kersey. As they narrow below the knee, they fit particularly well with our high boots and heavy stockings. / Smelts running fairly well in the salt rivers, and baskets of freshly caught dozens for sale in various stores.

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The seed catalogues are arriving again, and as I take them from their brown envelopes and study them at the kitchen table, I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman’s relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance. Alas, I know well enough that Nature has her hostile moods, and I am equally aware that we must often face and fight as we can her waywardness, her divine profusion, and her divine irrationality. Even then, I will have it, the alliance holds. When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature of which we are inescapably a part. Be it storm and flood, hail and fire, or the yielding furrow and the fruitful plain, an alliance it is, and that alliance is a cornerstone of our true humanity.