ough to milk a whole herd of cows,
but did not see the man approaching from the town.

Winter Animals

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the
familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it
was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over
it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of
nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the
extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood
before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice,
moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or
Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did
not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when
I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and
passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond,
which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins
high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.
Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow
and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when
the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers
were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and
except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid
and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods
and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.

For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the
forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such
a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable
plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar
to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I
seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo
hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables
accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo only. One
night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine
o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to
the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods
as they flew low over my house. Th