Three months later there was to be scant picking here, for this was the
beginning of the severest winter I ever knew. From this very ridge, in
February, I had reports of berries gone, of birds starving, of whole
coveys of quail frozen dead in the snow; but neither the birds nor I
dreamed to-day of any such hunger and death. A flock of robins whirled
into the cedars above me; a pair of cardinals whistled back and forth;
tree sparrows, juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, and cedar-birds cheeped
among the trees and bushes; and from the farm lands at the top of the
slope rang the calls of meadowlarks.
Halfway up the hill I stopped under a blackjack oak where, in the thin
snow, there were signs of something like a Christmas revel. The ground
was sprinkled with acorn shells and trampled over with feet of several
kinds and sizes,--quail, jay, and partridge feet; rabbit, squirrel, and
mice feet, all over the snow as the feast of acorns had gone on.
Hundreds of the acorns were lying about, gnawed away at the cup end,
where the shell was thinnest, many of them further broken and cleaned
out by the birds.
As I sat studying the signs in the snow, my eye caught a tiny trail
leading out from the others straight away toward a broken pile of cord
wood. The tracks were planted one after the other, so directly in line
as to seem like the prints of a single foot. "That's a weasel's trail,"
I said, "the death's-head at this feast," and followed it slowly to the
wood.
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