All life and action upon the snow have an added emphasis and significance.  Every expression is underscored.  Summer has few finer pictures than this winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle from a stack upon the clean snow,—­the movement, the sharply defined figures, the great green flakes of hay, the long file of patient cows, the advance just arriving and pressing eagerly for the choicest morsels,—­and the bounty and providence it suggests.  Or the chopper in the woods,—­the prostrate tree, the white new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, his coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe.  The woods are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instrument.  Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds in the still, white world, the day after the storm, to restore the lost track and demolish the beleaguering drifts.

All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better.  At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain.  In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.

A severe artist!  No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel.  When the nights are calm and the moon full, I go out to gaze upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the snow.  The air is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me—­after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove.  The world lies about me in a “trance of snow.”  The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and seem the farthest possible remove from the condition of a storm,—­the ghosts of clouds, the indwelling beauty freed from all dross.  I see the hills, bulging with great drifts, lift themselves up cold and white against the sky, the black lines of fences here and there obliterated by the depth of the snow.  Presently a fox barks away up next the mountain, and I imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction.  As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley.  What a wild winter sound, wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills!  Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it.  So wild!  I get up in the middle of the night to hear it.  It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights to know that such wild creatures are among us.  At this season Nature makes the most of every throb of life that can withstand her severity.  How heartily she indorses this fox!  In what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of the snow!  The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectually as it obliterates.  I go into the woods, and know all that has happened.  I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbor, the fact is chronicled.

The red fox is the only species that abounds in my locality; the little gray fox seems to prefer a more rocky and precipitous country, and a less rigorous climate; the cross fox is occasionally seen, and there are traditions of the silver gray among the oldest hunters.  But the red fox is the sportsman’s prize, and the only fur-bearer worthy of note in these mountains. [Footnote:  A spur of the catskills.]