We came to a big wallow in the snow, where, in sudden fear, he had had a fit at the thought of something that might not have happened to him had he stayed at home. Every foot of the trail read, “He would if he could; but if he wouldn’t, how could he?” We followed him on, across a dozen other trails, for it is not every winter night that the muskrat’s feet get the better of his head, and, willy-nilly, take him abroad. Strange and fatal weakness! He goes and cannot stop. Along the stone wall of the meadow we tracked him, across the highroad, over our garden, into the orchard, up the woody hill to the yard, back down the hill to the orchard, out into the garden, and back toward the orchard again; and here, on a knoll just in the edge of the scanty, skeleton shadow where the moon fell through the trees, we lost him. Two mighty wings had touched the snow lightly here, and the lumbering trail had vanished as into the air. Close and mysterious the silent wings hang poised indoors and out. Laughter and tears are companions. Comedy begins, but tragedy often ends the trail. Yet the sum of life indoors and out is peace, gladness, and fulfillment. VIII THE CLAM FARM THE CLAM FARM: A CASE OF CONSERVATION Our hunger for clams and their present scarcity have not been the chief factors in the new national movement for the conservation of our natural resources; nor are the soaring prices of pork and lumber and wheat immediate causes, although they have served to give point and application to the movement. Ours is still a lavishly rich country. We have long had a greed for land, but we have not felt a pang yet of the Old World’s land-hunger. Thousands of acres, the stay for thousands of human lives, are still lying as waste places on the very borders of our eastern cities. There is plenty of land yet, plenty of lumber, plenty of food, but there is a very great and growing scarcity of clams. Of course the clam might vanish utterly from the earth and be forgotten; our memory of its juicy, salty, sea-fat flavor might vanish with it; and we, ignorant of our loss, be none the poorer. We should live on,--the eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave live on,--but life, nevertheless, would not be so well worth living. For it would be flatter, with less of wave-wet freshness and briny gusto. No kitchen-mixed seasoning can supply the wild, natural flavors of life; no factory-made sensations the joy of being the normal, elemental, primitive animal that we are. The clam is one of the natural flavors of life, and no longer ago than when I was a freshman was considered one of life’s necessities. Part of the ceremony of my admission to college was a clambake down the Providence River--such a clambake as never was down any other river, and as never shall be again down the Providence River, unless the Rhode Island clam-diggers take up their barren flats and begin to grow clams.