Page:The Way of the Wild (1923).pdf/293

 The arbutus, which has been safely hidden in the dead grass, is also a light sleeper and wakes early. That flower, too, I have gathered, on a sunny slope of the pasture land, almost within arm's length of a snow-bank.

Along the brookside the pussywillows are swelling while the winter is still with us. Some times the January thaw will bring them forth. Dear little cats of the brookside. How often have your furry faces cheered me in winter.

The sugar maple is the first of the large trees really to feel the touch of spring. Then its sap will go leaping up into its branches each day as the sun mounts, and scurrying back into the roots at night.

This is the season of maple-sugar-making, which was known to the American Indians long before the coming of the white man. But there is a wise little woodpecker, called the Yellow Bellied Sap Sucker, who learned the secret of the maple even before the Indians. Perhaps the Indian saw him at work and tasted the sap, and so discovered the secret.

When the sap first begins to mount in the