Twenty or thirty miles across the hills, on the way to the Green
Mountains, lie some finished chapters of pitiful stories--a few score
abandoned farms, started in a lean land, held fiercely so long as there
was any one to work them, and then left on the hill-sides. Beyond this
desolation are woods where the bear and the deer still find peace, and
sometimes even the beaver forgets that he is persecuted and dares to
build his lodge. These things were told me by a man who loved the woods
for their own sake and not for the sake of slaughter--a quiet,
slow-spoken man of the West, who came across the drifts on show-shoes
and refrained from laughing when I borrowed his foot-gear and tried to
walk. The gigantic lawn-tennis bats strung with hide are not easy to
manoeuvre. If you forget to keep the long heels down and trailing in the
snow you turn over and become as a man who fails into deep water with a
life-belt tied to his ankles. If you lose your balance, do not attempt
to recover it, but drop, half-sitting and half-kneeling, over as large
an area as possible. When you have mastered the wolf-step, can slide one
shoe above the other deftly, that is to say, the sensation of paddling
over a ten-foot-deep drift and taking short cuts by buried fences is
worth the ankle-ache. The man from the West interpreted to me the signs
on the snow, showed how a fox (this section of the country is full of
foxes, and men shoot them because riding is impossible) leaves one kind
of spoor, walking with circumspection as becomes a thief, and a dog, who
has nothing to be ashamed of, but widens his four legs and plunges,
another; how coons go to sleep for the winter and squirrels too, and how
the deer on the Canada border trample down deep paths that are called
yards and are caught there by inquisitive men with cameras, who hold
them by their tails when the deer have blundered into deep snow, and so
photograph their frightened dignity. He told me of people also--the
manners and customs of New Englanders here, and how they blossom and
develop in the Far West on the newer railway lines, when matters come