Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This time, we have an entry from March 1855. Thoreau was thirty-seven and had just caught a flying squirrel.
MARCH 23. P.M.—To Fair Haven Pond.
Carried my flying squirrel back to the woods in my handkerchief. I placed it, about 3.30 P.M., on the very stump I had taken it from. It immediately ran about a rod over the leaves and up a slender maple sapling about ten feet, then after a moment's pause sprang off and skimmed downward toward a large maple nine feet distant, whose trunk it struck three or four feet from the ground. This it rapidly ascended, on the opposite side from me, nearly thirty feet, and there clung to the main stem with its head downward, eying me. After two or three minutes' pause I saw that it was preparing for another spring by raising its head and looking off, and away it went in admirable style, more like a bird than any quadruped I had dreamed of and far surpassing the impression I had received from naturalists' accounts.
Painting: John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (1765)
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