Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/164

150 are gone some time, and come up a rod off. At first I saw but one, then, a minute after, three. The first phebe, near the water, is heard.

March 16, 1855. To Conantum End. At the woodchuck's hole, just beyond the cock-spur thorn, I see several diverging and converging tracks of, undoubtedly, a woodchuck or several, which must have come out at last as early as the 13th. The track is about one and three quarters inches wide by two long, the five toes very distinct and much spread, and, including the scrape of the snow before the foot came to its bearing, is somewhat handlike. It is simple and alternate, thus, * * * * * * commonly, but sometimes much like a rabbit's, and again, like a mink's, somewhat thus •• •• They had come out and run about directly from hole to hole, six in all, within a dozen rods or more. This appeared to have been all their traveling, as if they had run round a visiting and waked each other up the first thing. At first they soiled the snow with their sandy feet. At one place they had been clearing out to-day the throat of two holes within a rod of each other, scattering the mud-like sand, made wet by the melting snow, over the pure snow around. I saw where, between these holes, they had sat on a horizontal limb of a shrub-oak (which they had tried their teeth on) about a