Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/267

Rh But they keep up a faint, wiry kind of peep which betrays them, while she mews and squeaks as if giving them directions.—Chestnut trees are budded.—I picked a handful or two of blueberries. These and huckleberries deserve to be celebrated, such simple, wholesome, universal fruits, food for the gods and for aboriginal men. They are so abundant that they concern our race much. Tournefort called some of this genus at least, Vitis-Idœa, which apparently means the vine of Mount Ida. I cannot imagine any country without this kind of berry. Berry of berries, on which men live like birds, still covering our hills as when the red men lived here. Are they not the principal wild fruit?

June 27, 1853. 4.30 To Island by river. Saw a little pickerel with a minnow in its mouth. It was a beautiful little silver-colored minnow, two inches long, with a broad stripe down the middle. The pickerel held it crosswise near the tail, as he had seized it, and as I looked down on him, he worked the minnow along in his mouth toward the head, and then swallowed it head foremost. Was this instinct?

June 27, 1859. To Walden. I find an Attacus Luna half hidden under a skunk cabbage leaf, with its back to the ground and motionless, on the edge of a swamp. The