Go out on a cold December day, or a January day, and see how many “signs” of spring--“Minor Prophets,” as Mr. Torrey calls them--you can bring home. They will be mostly buds of various sorts. Then, on a warm, soft day, go again to see what you can bring home--flitting, creeping, crawling things that the warm sun has brought from their winter hiding. VII Make a map of your sky, showing the positions of the planets, the constellations, and the most brilliant stars, the points in the horizon for the rising and setting of the sun, say, in January, noting the changes in places of things since your last map drawn in October. Any school child can do it, and, in doing it, learn the few large facts about the sky that most people are pitifully ignorant of. VIII Go out after a fresh light snow and take up the trail of a fox or a rabbit or a partridge, as you might take up a problem in arithmetic, or as a detective might take up a clew, and “solve” it--where the creature came from, where going, what for, in a hurry or not, pursued or pursuing, etc. It will give you one of the best of lessons in observation, in following a clew, and in learning to take a hint. IX Go out to study the face of the ground--the ridges, hollows, level places, the ledges, meadows, sandbanks, the course of the streams, the location of the springs--the general shape and contour, the pitch and slant and make-up of the region over which you tramp in the summer. Now, when the leaves are off and things swept bare, you can get a general idea of the lay of the land that will greatly aid you in your more detailed study of plants and birds, of individual things, in the summer. It is like an outline map in your geography. X Winter is the time to do much good reading. A tramp over real fields is to be preferred to a tramp in a book. But a good book is pretty nearly as good as anything under the stars. You need both fields and books. And during these cold days--impossible days, some of them, for work afield--you will read, read. Oh, the good things to read that have been written about the out-of-doors! CHAPTER VIII THE MISSING TOOTH The snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened, faded, and stained with mud--a dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the winter snows. The spring was breaking now and the small bundle, gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.