This is the month, too, of maple sugar. Peter goes with his brothers to the trees they have tapped and spouted in the swamp, and they empty the pails in their bucket through the thin February sunshine. Later on, when there is enough of the syrup, the night stars are joined by the bursts of quick stars of spruce brush burning, and the small boy John for once sits up as late as he wants to, feeding the bonfire under the sap kettle, plays with fire all he-wants to and burns so many holes through his breeches that they look like a sieve.
Peter. Ann, Andrew. Molly. James, and Jane watch the thin liquid thicken brown, Each sits with a pan of new snow on his lap. and father pours out the red-hot maple syrup on the pan of Snow, it hardens into a brittle, and the children eat it by the light of the wavering bonfire and the dim stars overhead until they can hardly see out of their eyes for sweetness and sleepiness. Small John gets so covered with the candy he sticks to everything. He falls asleep and does not wake up even when the Arctic owl, scandalized by all these goings-on, inquires, with two echo-owls helping him to inquire in the deep, still woods, who is the plump little boy who has to be pulled home on a sled, cemented fast to it by maple syrup, with the red tassel of his stocking-leg Cap trailing on the starlit snow.
The book of this month for Peter is Robinson Crusoe. For Peter is the bookman of this family and of the peculiar kind of farm he lives on, this seagoing one, and his house has always had high bookcases in it, many of them bought in Europe. And Peter is reading his way through these shelves of books as fast as he can. He has permission from his father to burn the lamp as late into the night as he feels like burning it. The old Arctic owl always has to comment on the lateness of the light in the windows of this odd farmhouse.
Robinson Crusoe fits February very well. For Peter and his family are really marooned away from life this season. for all the fresh smelts and the surprised eels on Uncle Timothy's trident. They are marooned on the island of Winter, They have to make their way on their own resources and suck such comfort as they can out of solitude. For the world around them is a lonely desert now. They are Robinson Crusoes all right.
So Peter on his homemade skis follows all the tracks in the quiet woods, half expecting to see heel mark and toe prints going on into the spruces. Of course, a cannibal would find it rather cold underfoot and get chiains worse than Uncle Timothy's. But the old cannibal loneliness does stalk these dark woods when Peter stops at twilight time and listens to an axe chopping in company with another ghostly one that is not really there. Peter can shout and have his own shout come thinly back to him, too, but he doesn't feel like doing it. The silence makes him cautious and thoughtful. So he turns at last and goes creaking quietly home on his skis.
The boy learns a lot, though, before he gets too lonely, from the lacework of the different tracks on the snow in these woods. Featherstitching means mice. Cuneiform wedges mean crows. Here is a three-leaf clover and four leaf, too, where a rabbit has sat in different moods. And there the dot-dot-dash of a smart up-and-coming fox curves away over the hillocks of white. There is a lot of fine reading in the white books of the woods in the month of February, and Peter reads these books of the woods as eagerly as he reads the ones on his father's bookcase. Every hill and dell is a new page. Every creature leaves its history on the snow.
In the summer you would never know a thing about what was going on here among the hemlocks and spruces. But now it is different. Nothing can be done here but a smart boy knows it. Murder will out, and you can see murder where it took place by the rotten hemlock stump by the dark spots and strewn feathers. You know who the murderer is. Mis wings have left two wide, deep fans on the white. You know his wings are quiet and white as the snow. That inquisitive old asker of embarrassing questions in the night, the great Arctic owl, is the red-footed one.
The stillness of this part of the year goes well with Peter's thoughts of his lost love. Peter feels friends with trees that have nothing to say, and bare boughs of the maples. He even feels friends with poor Aunt Ella, who, for all her buttresses of good flesh, suffers the pangs of unrequited love. It is a sad, dead time all around and winter holds everything in thrall.
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