Hatching

“ Farms, tiled and thatched, basked in summery warmth, forest, hedge and copse, full-foliaged and abundant, shone out in copper and bronze, and the air's stillness, the patient tranquillity, enfolding the land, made it seem expectantly to wait for some sudden wind that should ultimately cast devastation through the forests. ”

“ The constant fighting with the floating stumps and trees caused them to lose so much ground—or rather water—that they were drifting frightfully close to the rapids, whose roar grew plainer every moment. ”

“ At other times each individual has its own particular haunt, from which, however, it makes long excursions into the surrounding forest or the neighbouring plains; such foraging expeditions often lasting for days together. In winter it frequently deserts the forest to take up its abode in old uninhabited buildings or other safe places of refuge. ”

“ Then, almost as though at a given signal, the forest resounded with loud trumpetings of alarm and the crashing of heavy bodies through the undergrowth, as the rest of the unseen herd began to move restlessly and angrily hither and thither, seeking the source of the sudden disturbance. ”

“ Immediately on the second hatch coming out, the young ones of the first hatch assist the old ones in feeding and hovering over them, leading them out in detached parties, and making additional nests for them, similar to their own, on the brink of the moat. ”

“ Human life had been sacrificed more than once, amid the snow-drift, on that wild moor-land, and sheep innumerable had been lost. To make my danger greater, the place was full of pits and hollows, where mining speculators had tried to sink shafts in former years. ”

“ In the deep and solitary forest they erect their huts, made of branches of trees, and bank up the snow round them, as a further protection against the piercing wind. They now roam and seek everywhere for the traces of the sable, and lay traps or snares for his destruction. ”

“ Winter storms shattered the deserted sheds; props gave way and allowed great masses of earth to fall on the discarded stone; earth and moss, living green cushions, filled in the unsightly tool wounds. ”

“ The turn of the thieves comes when the snow has fallen. Every track and tread is known; and no creature in hiding, if not winged, can escape, after going abroad over new-fallen snow. Every hollow in a tree or a hedge, every refuge in a stack, or a drain, or a cluster of rocks, is discovered and routed out. ”

“ The unfortunate creatures still crawled on, shivering, till the snow, gathering like balls under their feet, or the fragment of some broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades, caused them to stumble and fall. ”

“ Most of them live in almost inaccessible spots, beneath the snow covered, glaciated ridges, and beside fierce flowing torrents, where on occasions they have converted their homes into almost impregnable fortresses. ”

“ Thither the hunters are used to repair in sultry weather; and drawing up water with their horns, they sprinkle the stone for the purpose of having rain, which is then wont to fall, they say, throughout the whole forest around ”

“ The shores were strewed with them in all stages; many struck down in youth, with their young foliage about them; others in the sere and yellow leaf, while others again stripped of leaf and bark, are piled in great ‘wreck heaps,’ where the current has hurled them, or floating down the stream, in time to become a snag and lie in wait to impale some unconscious vessel. ”

“ Later on they congregate at little springs, always at running water, to reach which they have often to make long migrations. This is the only time when these thoroughly terrestrial creatures approach water, in which they easily get drowned. ”

“ Let us skin the birds, for it may be that we shall be unable to land for several days, and if so, we shall need all the covering we can get, for this thaw is sure to be followed by a severe frost or two. ”

“ The hardships, fatigue, and perils with which these expeditions are attended, may well be conceived when we consider the nature of the country, the season of the year, and the intense cold which the hunters have to endure. Frequently do they penetrate into the depths of immense and trackless woods, from which, they have no other mode of securing a retreat, than by marking the trees as they advance; and, if these marks should be obliterated and fail them, they must inevitably be lost; often have they to sustain the extremes of cold and hunger. ”

“ I tell you, when the thunder bursts forth with an earthquake shock and reverberates among the river-hills, and the lightning begins to play upon the cattle’s horns, these old hunters and herders, who have been hardened in the wilds for many years and who have seen the bloodiest of frontier life, come to their knees. ”

“ In determining where to set deadfalls or locate snares if you will keep in mind the dens where each winter you have caught fur-bearing animals, or their tracks have often been seen in the snow or mud, and build your traps and construct snares at or near such places you are pretty sure to not go astray. ”

“ Yes, the feathery flakes were all around them, not blindingly thick as yet, but certain precursors of the coming storm. The trail was still quite clear although the fugitives were no longer in sight.
An hour passed, two hours, three hours—and hunters and hunted still plodded on. ”

“ It runs along the ground, covering everything it meets with a network of branches which only the powerful hatchet can clear away. It is covered with sharp thorns which make it a most formidable obstruction to all who travel through these wilds. ”

“ The trampled grass and broken branches were caused by the constant movement of animals, ruminants or beasts of prey, but it was impossible to be under any misapprehension when they came upon the traces of encampments. ”

“ But one Summer the invaders did not go back to their mountains, as the people expected, but brought their families with them and settled down. So, driven from their homes and lands, starving in their little niches on the high cites they could only steal away during the night and wander across the cheerless uplands. ”

“ We hunt in cold weather when the ground is frozen hard, and we take everything as it is, hills, fences, streams, and hedges, risking our necks innumerable times in a hunt. In England the hunters have a flat country, fences which do not compare to ours in height, and they hunt after a frost when the ground is soft. ”

“ NOW when they went on thence, they came within two days into a country all broken up into little hills and ridges, and beset with scraggy shaws, wherein were but few men and fewer dwellings, and the men either hunters or herders of neat, well-nigh wild, and this lasted them for three days more ”

“ Yet this sort of game is almost impeded by itself, by reason of the many rocks and precipices, which, for the greatest part, are covered with little shrubs, very green, and thick; whence the huntsmen have oftentimes fallen, and left us the sad remembrance of many a memorable disaster. ”

“ The position of this hatchet, then, found at the very bottom of the loess deposits, shows that, while yet the glaciers lingered in the north, and the flooded rivers spread out in great lakes, some tribes of stone-using folks hunted along the banks of the lakes, whose bottoms were to form the rich prairies of the West. ”

“ Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; ”

“ The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors. ”

“ The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire. ”

“ They tried to pierce through the darkness so favorable to ambushes, for nothing could be heard but the noise of the tempest, the sough of the wind, the rattling branches, falling trees, and roaring of the unchained waters. ”

“ When now, unsparing as the scourge of war,
Blasts follow blasts, and groves dismantled roar,
Around their home the storm-pinch'd CATTLE lows,
No nourishment in frozen pastures grows;
Yet frozen pastures every morn resound
With fair abundance thund'ring to the ground. ”

“ During the summer months when you are running around through the fields and woods fishing and hunting and having a good time, then is the time to start the foundation for the coming season's trapping. ”

“ Sometimes they went perfectly smoothly along without jolts or jerks, and sometimes on the contrary, the plateau would reel and roll like a ship in a storm, coasting past abysses in which fragments of the mountain were falling, tearing up trees by the roots, and leveling, as if with the keen edge of an immense scythe, every projection of the declivity. ”

“ It was one of those brooding, changeful days that come between Indian summer and winter, when the leaf colors have grown dim and the clouds come and go among the cliffs like living creatures looking for work: now hovering aloft, now caressing rugged rock-brows with great gentleness, or, wandering afar over the tops of the forests, touching the spires of fir and pine with their soft silken fringes as if trying to tell the glad news of the coming of snow. ”

“ The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top. ”

“ Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; ”

“ And in the development of these Nature chose for a tool not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea. ”

“ By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by the corner where Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the paths where Estella and I had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary all! ”

“ With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,
And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel. ”

“ Far to the north and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey and quit the howling hill,
The shatter'd forest, and the ravag'd vale;
While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch,15
Disolving snows in livid torrents lost,
The mountains lift their green heads to the sky. ”

“ "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; ”

“ The Sulphurous Hail Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the Thunder, Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage, Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep. ”

“ Nature stepped in when man stepped out, and with an ordered disorder began to heal. The pine-needles dropped from the firs above, the browning wind-drifted beech leaves found refuge in the bottom from the blast, the winged sycamore seeds whirled through the air, the elderberries rolled down the slope. ”

“ Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. ”

“ Rocks of every conceivable shape, scorched and blasted with fire, wrested from the main and hurled into the sea, battled with the waves, their black scraggy points piercing the mist like giant hands upthrown to smite or sink in a fierce death-struggle. ”

“ We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much. ”

“ "'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it--foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away--the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. ”