...diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of leucisci, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes;...Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and ~i immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring,...

...resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chicadee, the blue-jay, and the woodpecker . . . ; and at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of...mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man" (Thoreau 1972). The only difference between then and now is that instead of the howling of wolves one...