6:27 a.m. 30 degrees, wind W 5 mph, the toe of a cold front. Sky: a composite of white and blue; silver highlights and a southerly mauve rinse; then, snow (out of where I'm not sure) spits and flurries, suddenly, a flake-streaked world, wet, mid-size, non-sticking . . . at the moment, a Valley of Teflon. (Won’t last.) A moveable and mobile feast: clouds, snow. Permanent streams: fuller than yesterday; merrily on the move over a carpet of drowned leaves; a few stirred by the current; sodden banks and slippery but ice-free rocks. Wetlands: slender mink leaves the pond and runs across the road, slipping into cattails, swallowed by marsh, fits perfectly between slender reeds, a thin mammal on life's narrow path. Not a stem out of place. Leaves me wanting. Pond: nine hooded mergansers— all females and juvenile males—dillydally on the far end, swimming and diving, bunched. One catches a small crayfish. No hasty retreat this morning.
The culvert that administers pond overflow now features mink, a dark brown tail flick. A sweet face, a stuffie with a mouth full of teeth. An amped-up carnivore, with a pair of devastatingly foul anal scent glands, which definitely speak to my dogs. And, a century ago, to the pioneering North American field biologist C. H. Merriam: one of the few substances, of animal, vegetable, or mineral origin, that has, on land or sea, rendered me aware of the existence of the abominable sensation called nausea. I raised three kits once, cast adrift in a motherless world. I recall their composty smell, strong but not nauseating. I released them on the bank of the White River before life got too out of hand.
In the culvert. Out again. In. Out. A quick peek—a furry periscope with a confined perspective. Around the rocky berm, the goldenrods, the willows, and then vanishes into thin air like a David Copperfield trick. The encounter: for me, a savory moment; for the mink, we’re an apparent roadside distraction; two dogs and a man . . . of which nothing good can come. I walk up the road backward, hoping for another glimpse. I'm disappointed, the dogs confused, and the mink engaged, somewhere, in the helter-skelter of life, away from prying eyes, an original social distancer.
Pileated calls, rocking the morning. Two red-breasted nuthatches join a group of chickadees in balsam fir; nuthatches work the truck, chickadees the ends of twigs. Guttural call of a raven and a crow duet in a world streaked by snow. Crows fly over the marsh, an avian afterthought, birds black against white lines. A female hairy woodpecker on pole-sized sugar maple, demurely tapping, tapping, tapping. Woodland Western Union.
As day broke, coyotes in the lower pasture pitched their voices to the waning moon, sealing a bargain with the night. Like us, an animal not built for social distancing.