Music Welcome to Snewscast, a podcast designed to help you fall asleep. We'd like to thank our listeners. If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the podcast app. Also share it with a Find us on snoozecast.com and follow us on social media and wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode is supported by our Patreon supporters and the low-hanging winter sun. Tonight we'll read another excerpt from In New England Fields and Woods written by Roland Evans Robinson in 1896. Robinson was, in his time, one of Vermont's best known writers. This collection of short essays follows New England's changing changing seasons and moods in all its natural beauty.

This particular selection is part of the late wintertime section.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. February days. In the blur of storm or under clear skies, the span of daylight stretches farther from the fading dusk of dawn to the thickening dusk of evening. Now in the silent downfall of snow, now in the drift and whirl of flakes driven from the sky, and tossed from the earth by the shrieking wind, the day's passage is unmarked by shadows. It is but a long twilight, coming upon the world out of one misty gloom and going from it into another. Now the stars fade and vanish in the yellow-morning sky. The long shadows of the hills clear cut on the shining fields, swing slowly northward and and draw eastward to the netted umbridge of the wood. So the dazzling day grows and wanes, and the attenuated shadows are again stretched to their utmost, then dissolved in the flood of shade, and the pursued sunlight takes flight from the mountain peaks to the clouds, from cloud to cloud along the darkening sky, and vanishes beyond the blue barrier of the horizon. There are days of perfect calm and hours of stillness as of sleep when the lightest This wisp of cloud-fleece hangs, moveless, against the sky, and the pine trees forget their song. But for the white columns of smoke that, unbent in the still air, arise from farm-stead chimneys, one might imagine that all the fares of life had been laid aside. For no other sign of them is visible, no sound of them falls upon the air. You see the cows and sheep in the sheltered barnyards, and their lazy breaths arising in little clouds. But no voice of theirs drifts to you. No laden team crawls creaking along the highway nor merry jangle of sleigh bells flying into and out of hearing over its smooth course. Nor forest space, to the tireless panting engine and roaring train divide earth and sky with a wedge of dissolving vapor. The broad expanse of the lake is a white plane of snow-covered ice. No dash of angry waves, the sails it sure, still glittering, with the trophies of their last assault. No glimmer of bright water greets the sun. No keel is a float. The lighthouse, its occupation gone, on, Stair's day and night with dull eyes from its lonely rock upon a silent, deserted waste. In the wood you may hear no sound but your own muffled footsteps, the crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from your passage. And now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a clear resonant crack of frozen fibers and its faint echo. You hear no bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the pungent fragrance of his fire, nor the subtler one of fresh cut wood. Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens. Only sentless air reaches your nostrils. One day, there comes from the south, a warm breath, and with its fleets of white clouds sailing across the blue upper deep, outstripped by their swifter shadows sweeping in blue squadrons along the glistening fields and darkening, with brief passage the Greywoodlands. Faster come the clouds out of the south and out of the west, till they crowd the sky, only fragments of its intense azure showing here and there between them, only now and then a gleam of sunlight flashing across the earth. Then the blue sunlit sky is quite shut away behind a low arch of gray, darkening at the horizon with thick watery clouds, and beneath it all the expanse of fields and forest lies in universal shadow. The south wind is warmer than yesterday's sunshine. The snow softens till your footsteps are sharply molded as in wax. And in a little space each imprint is flecked thick with restless, swarming myriads of snowflakes. Rain begins to fall softly on snow-covered roofs, but beating the pains with the familiar pattern of summer showers. It becomes a steady downpour that continues till the saturated snow can hold no more. When the hidden brooks begin to show in yellow streaks between white unstable shores, and

glide with a swift, whisking rush over the smooth bottom that paves their rough, natural bed. And as their yellow currents deepen and divide more widely their banks, the noise of their onflow fills the air like an exaggeration of the murmur of pines, and the song of the pines swells and falls with the varying wind. After the rain there come, perhaps, some hours of quiet sunshine or starlight, and then out of the north a nipping wind that hardens the surface of the snow into solid crust that delights your feet to walk upon. The rivulettes shrink out of sight again, leaving no trace but water-worn furrows in the snow. Some frozen fluffs of yellow foam and stranded leaves and twigs, grass and broken weeds. The broad pools have left their shells of unsupported ice, which, with frequent sudden crashes, shatters down upon their hollow beds. When the crust has invited you forth, you cannot retrace your way upon it, and the wild snow walkers make no record now of their recent wanderings. But of those who fared abroad before the solid pavement was laid upon the snow. Fabulous tales are now inscribed upon it. Reading them without question, you might believe that the well-tamed country had lapsed into the possession of its ancient savage tenets. For the track of the fox is as as big as a wolf's, the raccoons as large as a bear's, the house cats as broad as the panthers, and those of the muskrat in mink persuade you to believe that the beaver and otter departed hundred years ago have come to their own again. Till the next thought or snowfall, they are set as indelibly as permeable footprints in the rocks. And for any scent that tickles the hounds keen nose might be as old. He sniffs them curiously and contemptuously passes on. Yet finds little more promising on footing that retains, but for an instant the subtle trace of rainards unmarked passage. The delicate curves and circles at the bent weeds etched on the soft snow are widened and deepened in rigid grooves, wherein the point that the fingers of the wind trace them with is frozen fast. Far and wide from where they fall, all manner of seeds drift across miles of smooth fields, to spring to life and bloom, buy and buy, in strange, unaccustomed places, and Brown leaves voyage to where their like was never grown. The icy knoll shine in the sunlight with dazzling splendor, like golden islands in a white sea that the north wind stirs not, and a thwart in the

low sun, and the waning moon cast their long, unrippled glades of gold and silver.

Overall winter again holds sway, but we have once more heard the sound of rain and running

brooks and have been given a promise of spring. Among the few survivors of the old untamed world, there are leftists too that retain all the raciness of their ancestral wildness. Their wits have been sharpened by the attrition of civilization, but it has not smoothed their characteristics down to the level of the commonplace, nor contaminated them with acquired vices as it has their ancient contemporary, but they are held in widely different esteem. For while the partridge is in a manner encouraged in continuance, the fox is an outlaw with a price set upon his head. For these and for him, there is an unwritten code that stealthily enforced gives him some exemption from universal persecution. Then they, having knowledge of the underground house of many portals, were the vixen rares her cubs, guard the secret as jealously as she and her lord. From the unfriendly farmer, poultry wife, and bounty hunting vagabond, And fighting it only to sworn brethren of woodcraft, as silent concerning it to the unfriendly as the trees that shadow its booty-strune precence, or the likened rocks that fortify it against pick and spade. They never tell even their leashed hounds till autumn makes the woods gair with painted leaves, then summer could with blossoms. How they have seen the master and mistress of this woodland home, stealing to it, with a fair, a field mice, fringing their jaws, or bearing a stolen lamb, or pull it. They watch from some unseen vantage with amused kindness. The gambles of the yellow cubs about their mother, alert, for danger, even in her drowsy weariness, and proud of her impish brood, even now practicing tricks of theft and cunning on each other, they become a betterse of this family's sins, apologists for its crimes, magnifiers of its unment well-doing. The slaughter of a turkey that has robbed a field of his weight and

corn, they offset the destruction of hordes of field-nice. They are aviled by those who are

righteously exalted above the idleness of hunting and the foolishness of sentiment.

At such hands one fares no better who covets the fox,

not for the sport he may give, but for the tang of wild flavor that he imparts to woods that have almost lost it and to fields that lose nothing of thrift by its touch. You may not see him, but it is good to know that anything so untamed has been so recently where your plotting footsteps go. You see in last night Snowfall the sharp imprint of his pads where he has divously quested mice under the mat of aftermath, or trotted slowly, pondering to other more promising fields, or they are gone airily, coursing away over the moonlit pastures. In imagination, you see all his agile gates and graceful poses. Now listening with pricked ears to the muffled squeak of a mouse, now pouncing upon his captured but yet unseen prize, or wear on sudden impulse his coarsed to fresh fields, you see him, a fantame, gliding with graceful undulations of life-body and brush over the snowy stretches, or holding to wistfully sniff as a wolf a sheepfold, the distant hen-roost, or where a curious labyrinth of tracks and print the snow. you have a vision of him, dallying with his tawny, sweet heart under the stars of February skies. Or by this soft mold of his very form on a snow-capped stump or boulder. You picture him sleeping off the fatigue of hunting and love-making with all senses, but sights still alert, unharmed by the nipping air that silvers his whiskers with his own breath. All these realities of his actual life you may not see except in such pictures as your fancy makes. But when the woods are many huge or brown and autumn, or gray and white in winter, and stirred with the wild music of the hounds, your blood may be set tingling by the sight of him. His coming announced by the rustle of leaves under his light-footfalls, perhaps unharbled it by sound. He suddenly blooms rudely out of the dead whiteness of the snow, whether he flies past or carefully picks his way along a fallen tree or bare ledge. You remark his facial expression of incessent intentness on cunning devices, while it hears, eyes, and nose are alert for danger. If he discovers you, with what ready self-possession he instantly gets and keeps a tree between himself and you, and vanishes while your gun vanily searches for its opportunity. If your shot brings him down and you stand over him exultant, yet pitting the end of his wild life, even in his death-throws, fearing you no more, he yet strains his dull deers to to catch the voices of the relentless hounds.

Bravely, the wild free-booter hold his own against the encroachments of civilization, and the persecution of mankind, leveeing on the flocks and broods of his enemy, rearing his yellow coubs in the very border of his field, insulting him with nightly passage by his threshold. Long ago his father's bade farewell to their grim cousin the wolf, and saw the beaver and the timid deer pass away, and he sees the eagle almost banished from its double realm of earth and sky, yet he heartily endures. For what he preserves for us, and of the almost extinct wildness shall we begrudge him the meager compensation of an occasional turkey? An ice storm. Of all the vagaries of winter weather, one of the rarest is the ice storm. Rain falling with a wind, and from a quarter that should bring snow and freezing as it falls. penetrating the snow, but coating it with a shining armor, sheathing every branch and twig in crystal and fringing eaves with icicles of most fantastic shapes. On ice-clad roofs and fields and crackling trees, the rain still beats with a lead in clatter, unlike any other sound of rain, unlike the rebounding pelting of hail or the swish of wind-blown snow. The trees begin to stoop under their increasing burden, and then to crack and groan as it has laid still heavier upon them. At times it's heard the thin, echoless crash of an overlaid in branch, first bending to its downfall with a gathering crackle of severed fibers, then with a sudden shattering in a in a thousand fragments, the brief adornments that I've wrought its destruction. Every kind of tree has as marked individuality in its icy garniture as in its summer foliage. The gracefulness of the Elms, the maples, the birches, the beaches, and the horn beams is preserved, and even intensified, the clumsy ramege of the butternut and ash is as stiff as ever, though every unbending twig bears its row of glittering pendants. The hem walks and furs are tense of ice, but the pines are still pines, with every needle exaggerated in bristling crystal. Some worthless things have become of present value as the wayside distals in the bejeweled grass of an unshorned meadow that yesterday, with its done unsightliness, rustling above the snow, proclaimed the shiftlessness of its owner. Things most unpicture-esque are made beautiful. The wire of the telegraph, with its dull undulations, is transformed to festoons of crystal fringe, linking together shining pillars of glass that yesterday were but bare, unsightly posts. The woods are a maze of fantastic shapes of tree growth. Wood roads are barricaded with low arches of ice, that the hair and the fox can barely find passage beneath, and with long curved slants of great limbs bent to the earth. The wild vines are turned to ropes and cables of ice, and have dragged down their strong supports, about whose prostrate trunks and limbs they writhe in a tangle of frigid coils. The life trunks of second growth are looped in an intricate confusion of arches, one upon another, many upon one, over whole acres of low-roofed forest floor. The hair and the grouse cower in these tents of ice, frightened and hungry, for every sprout and bud is sheathed in adamant and scarlet berries, magnified and unattainable, glow in the heart of crystal globules. Even the brave chickadees are appalled, and the disheartened woodpecker moaps beside the dead trunk, behind whose impenetrable shield he can hear the grub boring and safety. Through the frozen brambles that lattice the doorway of his burrow, the fox peers dismayed upon a glassy surface that will hold no scent of quarry. Yet, perhaps is comforted that the same conditions impose a truce upon his enemies, the hounds. The squirrel sits fasting in his chamber, longing for the stores that are locked from their owner in his cellar. It is the dismalist of all storms for the wood folk, despite all the splendor wherewith it adorns their realm. One holds out his hand and lifts his face skyward to assure himself that the rain has ceased. For there is continual clattering pattern as if it were yet falling, but it is only the crackling of the icy trees and the incessant dropping of small fragments of their burden.

The grey curtain of the sky drifts the sunder, and the low sun shines through.

It glorifies the earth with the flash and gleam of ten million diamonds set everywhere. The fire and color of every gem that was ever delved, burn along the borders of the golden pathway that stretches from your feet far away to the silver portals of the mountains that bar our glittering world from the flaming sky. The pallid gloom of the winter night falls upon the earth, then the full moon throbs up behind the scintillating barrier of the hills. She presently paves from herself to us a street of silver among the long blue shadows, and lights it with a thousand stars. Some fallen quite to earth, some twinkling among the drooping branches, all as bright as the eternal stars that shine in the blue sky above. Spare the trees. All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is deforested, nor keep fish and waters that have shrunk to a quarter of their ordinary volume before mid-summer. The streams of such a country will thus shrink when the mountains, where the snow-ly latest and the feeding springs are, and the swamps, which dole out their slow but steady tribute are bereft of shade. The thin soil of a rocky hill, when deprived of its shelter of branches, will be burned by the summer sun, out of all power to help the germination of any worthy seed, or to nurture so noble a plant as a tree through the tender days of its infancy. Its supports only useless weeds and brambles. so denuded, it will be unsightly and unprofitable for many years, if not always. Some swamps, at great expense, may be brought into tillage and meadow. But nine times out of ten, when cleared of the lusty growth of woods, they bear nothing but wild grass, and the streams that trickled from them all this summer long in their days of wildness show in August only the parched trail of the spring-course. Ledges and steep slopes that can bear nothing but wood to any profit are shorn of their last tree, and the margins of streams to the very edge robbed of the willows, and water maples that shaded the water, and with their roots protected the banks from washing, who has not known a little alder swamp in which he was sure to find a dozen woodcock when he visited on the first day of the season

each year. Some year the first day comes and he seeks it as usual, to find its place marked only by brush-heaps, stubs, and suchs, and for the brook that wimple through it in the days of your only stagnant pools. the worst of it is the owners can seldom give any reason for this slaughter, but that their victims were trees and bushes. The Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, appears entirely to lose these gifts when it comes to the proper and sensible management of woodlands.

Can he not understand that it is more profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one and is every year becoming a more valuable one. It breaks the fierceness of the winds and keeps the springs from drying up and is a comfort to the eye, whether in the greenness of the leaf or the beariness of the bow, and under its protecting arms live and breed

the grouse, the quail, and the hair, and in its shadowed wheels swim the drought. you you you you