I walk along the old road, and note the tracks in the thin layer of mud.  When do these creatures travel here?  I have never yet chanced to meet one.  Here a partridge has set its foot; there, a woodcock; here, a squirrel or mink; thee, a skunk; there, a fox.  What a clear, nervous track reynard makes! how easy to distinguish it from that of a little dog,—­it is so sharply cut and defined!  A dog’s track is coarse and clumsy beside it.  There is as much wildness in the track of an animal as in its voice.  Is a deer’s track like a sheep’s or a goat’s?  What winged-footed fleetness and agility may be inferred from the sharp, braided track of the gray squirrel upon the new snow!  Ah! in nature is the best discipline.  How wood-life sharpens the senses, giving a new power to the eye, the ear, the nose!  And are not the rarest and most exquisite songsters wood-birds?

Everywhere in these solitudes I am greeted with the pensive, almost pathetic not of the wood pewee.  The pewees are the true flycatchers, and are easily identified.  They are very characteristic birds, have strong family traits and pugnacious dispositions.  They are the least attractive or elegant birds of our fields or forests.  Sharp-shouldered, big-headed, short-legged, of no particular color, of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt of the tail, always quarreling with their neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection.  The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest display of pluck in his antagonist.  I have seen him turn tail to a swallow, and have known the little pewee in question to whip him beautifully.  From the great-crested to the little green flycatcher, their ways and general habits are the same.  Slow in flying from point to point, they yet have a wonderful quickness, and snap up the fleetest insects with little apparent effort.  There is a constant play of quick, nervous movements underneath their outer show of calmness and stolidity.  They do not scour the limbs and trees like the warblers, but, perched upon the middle branches, wait, like true hunters, for the game to come along.  There is often a very audible snap of the beak as they seize their prey.

The wood pewee, the prevailing species in this locality, arrests your attention by his sweet, pathetic cry.  There is room for it also in the deep woods, as well as for the more prolonged and elevated strains.