6:13 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 9 degrees, wind NE 2 mph. Sky: clear, a rumor of peach across the south as thin and transparent as cellophane. Sunlight kisses the summits of Tug Mountain, Gove and Richardson hills, warms Mount Ascutney, forty miles to the southwest, lavender-gray like a cloud fixed to the horizon. Permanent streams: for the moment, an illusion of immutable ice-bound flow; upper, sealing over (again), a see-through lid; lower, beneath a mantle of rock-solid snow. Wetlands: late with sunlight, early with freeze, an impoundment of cold air, flowing in rivulets down Robinson Hill. Pileated, drums in the hemlocks, a resonant ringing across the marsh, my fingers too numb to time the pauses. An absence of bobcat, really . . . but not of vivid memory, which germinates by the alders, morning after morning, four days running. Pond: surface dense and bumpy, beyond hockey. Hairy woodpecker drums, a speedy, even-tempo reverberation like Meadowlark Lemon dribbling a basketball, more pulse than pound; crow flies south calls attention to itself.
Titmice mum, resolute and unswerving, feed in silence. Chickadees, no time for food, surrender to an unmitigated urgency, whistling everywhere. Rills of warm air and music, spilling out of tiny beaks, fleeting clouds of exhalation. Pileated returned to roadside maple, chips litter the snow. Like any reasonable investment, the reward (carpenter ants) must exceed expenditure (energy) to excavate. White-breasted nuthatches singing, calling, feeding, storing, probing, wandering headfirst down the bark pathways, pausing for a moment, heads back, Buddhas with upturned bills . . . little agents of the sun.
One gorgeous red-breasted nuthatch picks grit off the road, white face, black eyestripe, lifelong mascara.
Yesterday: I couldn't help myself. I went into the marsh, directly into the alders, seeking a ghost. Three days behind bobcat . . . but I'm still overflowingly curious. Cat walked through the alders as though branches were invisible. I stumbled, broken limbs in my wake. Bobcat entered the cattails, crossed where the marsh narrows behind the decrepit beaver dam, and then followed the west shore, just inside the hemlock and pine sweep, north. Footprints like cookies lead me on and on and on. What did I learn? Well, the cat prefers shadows, prefers moving, found a friend, a smaller bobcat . . . and, together, they climbed Robinson Hill, a crepuscular couple planning for the future.
Who would I rather have tracked the bobcat with? Charles Darwin or Theodore Roosevelt or John Burroughs? Maybe Rachel Carson?
Darwin would have thrilled me with talk of evolution and natural selection, and the biological meaning of love. Roosevelt would have had the stamina and determination to follow the bobcats over the Hill and into the valley of Lake Fairlee; he might have been receptive to protecting the glacially inscribed landscape for later generations of bobcats and people. Burroughs would have transformed our walk into lyrical prose, sweet enough to make my eyes water . . . enticing me to leave the blue screen. Carson would have fused science and art into an irresistible whole, into a sense of wonder. There are uncharted waters beyond my doorstep. And, every morning in every way, as dark yields to light, I take The Hollow's treble-hook and swim downstream, boyishly noshing on daybreak’s residual gifts.
Ah, I'd take Mary Oliver--her poem "The Bobcat" captures so much of what you've felt. :
"One night
long ago,
in Ohio,
a bobcat leaped
like a quick
clawed
whirlwind of light
from the pines
beside the road
and our hearts
thudded and
stopped–
those lightning eyes!
that dappled jaw!
those plush paws!
And I'd invite Annie Dillard as well--she and Oliver are witnesses to wonder.