6:57 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 10 degrees, wind NW 4 mph. Sky: like a light-bodied red wine, maybe a pale Pinot Noir, clean and clear with a hint of rose, deeper in the south. Sunshine on the crest of Robinson Hill, a slow, lustrous descent. Permanent streams: except for chickadees whistling in the alders, both tributaries facsimiles of yesterday, visually and audibly. Wetlands: brown isles of the sweet gale, stark, in an ocean of bright, desolate white. Tracks through the reeds my own. White-breasted nuthatches in the pines on the fringe of the marsh, calling. Red-breasted, silent or absent. Pond: an inch of fresh, untracked snow.
All along the walk, chickadees tuning up for spring, one here, one there—measured discharges of enthusiasm. Flocks still cohesive . . . but for how long? Crow over the marsh, heads northwest, directly into the wind. Keeps to himself, a silent, lonely flight.
Coyote tracks up the driveway, down the driveway—dogs, noses buried in the snow, the smell of last night still thick—in and out of the oaks, the pines, the maples, along the snowmobile trail, a straight, thoughtful path, one foot after the other. A wild canid, on a solo, searches for something. Dinner in the compost pile, on the hoof, under the feeder? Companionship? News of the World, fresh off the snow? A mid-sized, itinerant mammal living on the doorstep of humanity. Perhaps, an echo of a long-forgotten Siberian camp, when a curious wolf, light dancing on thick fur, moved closer to the fire and began to narrow an interspecies gap.
That interspecies gap is the theme of Aldo Leopold's incredible story of the green fire dying in the eyes of a wolf he had sheltered, and "Green Fire" became an amazing film:
https://www.aldoleopold.org/teach-learn/green-fire-film/about-green-fire/
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
Now if only we could narrow some of the intraspecies gaps between us--I haven't seen the film of NEWS OF THE WORLD, but I read the book by Paulette Jiles and was transfixed. What a splintered species we are, we Homo sapiens.