As I sat studying the signs in the snow, my eye caught a tiny trail leading out from the others straight away toward a broken pile of cord wood.  The tracks were planted one after the other, so directly in line as to seem like the prints of a single foot.  “That’s a weasel’s trail,” I said, “the death’s-head at this feast,” and followed it slowly to the wood.  A shiver crept over me as I felt, even sooner than I saw, a pair of small sinister eyes fixed upon mine.  The evil pointed head, heavy but alert, and with a suggestion of fierce strength out of all relation to the slender body, was watching me from between the sticks of cordwood.  And so he had been watching the mice and birds and rabbits feasting under the tree!

I packed a ball of snow round and hard, slipped forward upon my knees, and hurled it.  “Spat!” it struck the end of a stick within an inch of the ugly head, filling the crevice with snow.  Instantly the head appeared at another crack, and another ball struck viciously beside it.  Now it was back where it first appeared, and did not flinch for the next, or the next ball.  The third went true, striking with a “chug” and packing the crack.  But the black, hating eyes were still watching me a foot lower down.

It is not all peace and good-will in the Christmas woods.  But there is more of peace and good-will than of any other spirit.  The weasels are few.  More friendly and timid eyes were watching me than bold and murderous.  It was foolish to want to kill—­even the weasel.  For one’s woods are what one makes them; and so I let the man with the gun, who chanced along, think that I had turned boy again, and was snowballing the woodpile, just for the fun of trying to hit the end of the biggest stick.

I was glad he had come.  As he strode off with his stained bag, I felt kindlier toward the weasel.  There were worse in the woods than he,—­worse, because all of their killing was pastime.  The weasel must kill to live, and if he gloated over the kill, why, what fault of his?  But the other weasel, the one with the blood-stained bag, he killed for the love of killing.  I was glad he was gone.

The crows were winging over toward their great roost in the pines when I turned toward the town.  They, too, had had good picking along the creek flats and ditches of the meadows.  Their powerful wing-beats and constant play told of full crops and no fear for the night, already softly gray across the white silent fields.  The air was crisper; the snow began to crackle under foot; the twigs creaked and rattled as I brushed along; a brown beech leaf wavered down and skated with a thin scratch over the crust; and pure as the snow-wrapped crystal world, and sweet as the soft gray twilight, came the call of a quail.

The voices, colors, odors, and forms of summer were gone.  The very face of things had changed; all had been reduced, made plain, simple, single, pure!  There was less for the senses, but how much keener now their joy!  The wide landscape, the frosty air, the tinkle of tiny icicles, and, out of the quiet of the falling twilight, the voice of the quail!