6:18 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 14 degrees, wind WNW 10 mph. Sky: mottled blue and white, half-moon bright behind a screen of gauzy clouds. Permanent streams: upper, thin shelves of ice grow out from the shoreline; lower, hosted a weasel, which followed the streambed off the hill and under the road, and then veered into the woods. An endless quest for mice. Old otter tracks, the repository of woodland scraps—bits of bark, pine needles, mostly—swept off the snow by last night's wind. Wetlands: no bobcat, just a memory. A mammal of the periphery, an edge walker. I superimpose the bobcat into every stand of alder, into the shadows of drooping hemlock bows, and in the middle of the tan cattail wands. In my mind, I place the bobcat everywhere but in the white expanse of winter-bent reeds, the realm of wandering black bears and coyotes or a home-bound otter, swollen with pups. Across the marsh, pileated drumming in the pines . . . disrupts my daydream. Pond: pair of coyotes tracked the surface, two parallel lines, foot-by-foot almost single-file. Prints dwarf fox, but much smaller than my humongous shepherds', which are palm-sized, more like dire wolves.
Two east-bound crows locked in conversation, a hundred yards apart, hurling voices against an icy wind. A flock of seven chickadees chasing each other. Hard to tell who's in charge. Directions change repeatedly. Two birds land on a fir limb (for a moment). One fluffs out, the other squeezes feathers tight, letting out all warm, insulating air—a submissive gesture— posture called sleek. Fluffy initiates chase again. Both birds join the other five, and then everyone chasing, chasing, chasing.
I read an article this morning a friend sent me from the Dartmouth News about a wooly mammoth rib unearthed in Mount Holly, Vermont 1848, during the Burlington and Rutland railroad-line construction. The rib was recently radiocarbon-dated . . . 12,800 years old. Very likely, New England's earliest humans knew the wooly mammoth, a supposition until now. In 1849, from Charlotte, a beluga whale fossil surfaced during railroad excavation. Clearly, the land I walk was once an undulating, rock-studded tundra and, west of the Green Mountains, Lake Champlain, a vast inland sea, bridged to the North Atlantic by a tidal Saint Lawrence River. Think of what else might have been residents here: golden plovers, snow buntings, Lapland longspurs, hoary redpolls, gyrfalcons, and snowy owls, perched on a grass-covered esker, scanning the barren lands. Lynx were moving back. Caribou were already here. And likey musk ox, Arctic fox, and polar bear (on the lakeside of Vermont). And Arctic hare, willow and rock ptarmigan, red knots . . . who knows. But it's fun to speculate. Change, a difficult concept for people, the only constant Earth has ever known.
And once again my thoughts go to Loren Eiseley and his book, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY. A rib 12, 800 years old--how can I even wrap my head around those years and all the changes. Sometimes I wonder if we humans insulate ourselves against the terrors of time by retreating to our own inventions that give us the illusion of control. As Eiseley says, “The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.”