Jan. 5, 1853. To Kibbe Place Swamp.
I see where probably a red squirrel had scratched along over the snow, and in one place a very perfect and delicate print of his feet. His five toes in separate sharp triangles distinctly raying off, or often only four visible. In one place, I find a beaten track from a hole in the ground to [a] walnut a rod distant up which they have gone for nuts, which still hang on it. The whole print of the foot, etc., is about an inch and three quarters long, a part of the leg being impressed. Two of the tracks, when they are running, apparently, the two foremost, are wider apart; and perhaps with one pair they often make five marks, with the other four. Where there is a deep fur row in a chestnut tree between two swelling muscles, in two instances the squirrels, knowing it to be hollow, have gnawed a hole, enlarging the crack between two cheeks, and so made themselves a treat. In one instance they have commenced to gnaw between the cheeks, though no cavity appears, but I have no doubt the tree is hollow. A large yellow birch — or black — has the main stem very short and branches very long, nearly from one center.
There was a fine rosy sky in the west after sunset; and later an amber-colored horizon, in which a single tree-top showed finely.
-H.D.T.
Jan. 5, 2021.
An hour before dusk with snow sprinkling down from a gray sky, my family and I enter Estabrook Woods at the border of Concord and Carlisle onto the Kibbe Trail. A light layer of fresh snow softens the look of a bordering stone wall (and granite posts), which cross a stream running from the north. (The Kibbe property granite posts, carved with a "C" in them, demark the original Kibbe property which, upon petition by the Kibbe family, remained a part of Concord north of its border until about 1900, well after Carlisle split off from Concord in the 1750s.) . Slightly off-trail to the right, we find the old Kibbe Place stone foundation and cellar hole.
My son and I tromp southerly through the woods to find the nearby swamp. Combing through the trees, we find no signs of squirrel or other animal tracks, but promising animal holes in the bottom of several trunks. I find one yellow birch with two stems at the wetland’s edge, and a large decaying mass of a dead tree of unknown species, but with certain rot, hollowness, and a woodpecker hole into its muscular structure. The swamp is quiet and we feel very isolated as the light increasingly fades.
Only a darkened gray sky accompanies us as we drive home; amid the dim we notice among the scattered holiday lit homes, one very large, brightly-lit tree standing alone a field.
Comments