Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/48

34 a good end. So many of these houses being broken open, twenty or thirty I see, I look into the open hole, and find in it, in almost every instance, many pieces of the white root, with the little leaf bud curled up, which I take to be the yellow lily root. The leaf bud unrolled has the same scent as the yellow lily. There will be a half dozen of these pointed buds, more or less green, coming to a point at the end of the root. Also I see a little coarser, what I take to be the green leaf stalk of the pontederia, for I see a little of the stipule sheathing the stalk from within it (?) In one hole there was a large quantity of the root I have mentioned, its leaf buds attached or bitten off. The root was generally five or six eighths of an inch in diameter. It must, I think, be the principal food of the muskrat at this time. If you open twenty cabins you will find it in at least three quarters of them, and nothing else unless a very little pontederia leaf stem (?). By eating, or killing at least, so many lily buds, they must thin out the plant considerably.—I saw no fresh clam shells in the holes and scarcely any on the ice anywhere on the edge of open places, nor are they probably deposited in a heap under the ice. It may be, however, that the shells are opened in the hole, and then dropped in the water near by.

Twice this winter I have noticed a muskrat