Sherlock Spends a Day in the Country

 

Kenneth Fearing,

March 11, 1944: "The New Yorker"

 

The crime, if there was a crime, has not been reported as yet;
The plot, if that is what it was, is still a secret somewhere in this wilderness of

newly fallen snow;
The conference, if it was a conference, has been adjourned, and now there is

nothing in this scene but pine trees, and silence, and snow, and still

more snow.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this apparent emptiness, notice the snow;
Observe that it literally crawls with a hundred different signatures of

unmistakable life.
Here is a delicate, exactly repeated pattern, where, seemingly, a cobweb came

and went,
And here some party, perhaps an acrobat, walked through these woods at

midnight on his mittened hands.
Thimbles and dice tracks and half-moons, these trademarks lead everywhere

into the hills;
The signs show that some amazing fellow on a bicycle rode straight up the face

of a twenty-foot drift,
And someone, it does not matter who, walked steadily somewhere on obviously

cloven feet.

Let us ourselves adjourn to the village bar, Watson (not saying very much

when we get there),
To consider this mighty, diversified army, and what grand conspiracy of

conspiracies it hatched,

What conclusions it reached, and where it intends to strike, and when,
Being careful to notice, as we go and return, the character and number of our

Own tracks in the snow.