The Face of the Fields by Dallas Lore Sharp

The ragged quilt of snow had slipped from the shoulders of the slopes, the gray face of the maple swamp showed a flush of warmth, and the air, out of the south to-day, breathed life, the life of buds and catkins, of sappy bark, oozing gum, and running water -- the life of spring; and through the faintly blending breaths, as a faster breeze ran down the hills, I caught a new and unmistakable odor, single, pointed, penetrating, the sign to me of an open door in the wood-lot, to me, indeed, the Open Sesame of spring.

"When does the spring come? And who brings it? " asks the watcher in the woods. "To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders and the pussy-willows begin to swell," writes Mr. Burroughs, "when the ice breaks up on the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward. " So I have written, also; written verses even to the pussy-willow, to the bluebird, and to the hepatica, as spring's harbingers; but never a line yet to celebrate this first forerunner of them all, the gentle early skunk. For it is his presence, blown far across the February snow, that always ends my New England winter and brings the spring. Of course there are difficulties, poetically, with the wood-pussy. I don't remember that even Whitman tried the theme. But, perhaps, the good gray poet never met a spring skunk in the streets of Camden. The animal is comparatively rare in the densely populated cities of New Jersey.