Talking Big

There was a fire in Lowell, as we judged, this night, and we saw the horizon blazing, and heard the distant alarm-bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne to these woods. But the most constant and memorable sound of a summer’s night, which we did not fail to hear every night afterward, though at no time so incessantly and so favorably as now, was the barking of the house-dogs, from the loudest and hoarsest bark to the faintest aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven, from the patient but anxious mastiff to the timid and wakeful terrier, at first loud and rapid, then faint and slow, to be imitated only in a whisper; wow-wow-wow-wow—wo—wo—w—w. Even in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a sufficiency of sound for the ear of night, and more impressive than any music.

This was in 1839. The details are told in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published ten years later in 1849. In 2003, the writer John McPhee made a similar journey, following Thoreau. He wrote about it in an essay that was published in The New Yorker. You can find the link here. McPhee did not mention any dogs.