6:41 a.m. 30 degrees, wind E 2 mph. Sky: half-moon overhead, alone in an unsullied sky. Permanent streams: creeping around its stone foundation, trickling through a maze of leaves; every so often, one leaf escapes the mat and goes for a ride, a tiny lifeboat—maple or birch or basswood—with a leaf-stem rudder; on a journey to compost. Wetlands: marsh and alders frost-glazed and hushed, except for the scream of the red-shouldered hawk, hurled down the valley like a javelin, undermining the far-off church bells. Pond: rolling mist above a settlement of leaves, a pond carpet, a turtle blanket. Unmoored islands of pine needles adrift in a miniature ocean, a transitory echo of plate tectonics, splitting and uniting, the accelerated illusion of geology.
Red-breasted nuthatches, some off-key, jabbering in the hemlocks. Hyperactive golden-crowned kinglets hover at the end of white spruce twigs. Mellow chickadees inspect ash branches or hang upside-down, probing webworm tents, soiled and ragged. Crows and blue jays proceeded by their voices. I hear yellow-rumped warblers in the woods, the lucid, inescapable rhythm of my boyhood in the dunes, a run of sharp, unmusical chek, chek, chek . . . but I can't find them. My dogs, a motley duo of discontent, ignore the warblers for the red squirrel that comes down the maple, scales the stonewall, and broadcasts a stream of invective—their interest peaking. Leashes tighten. Finding little, active birds becomes even more challenging. What is now, not coincidently, a test of wills, me with binoculars, the dogs with taught leashes, collectively enmeshed in unsustainable self-interest, we lose track of the squirrel and the warblers . . . as the first rays of sun gild the shoulders of Robinson Hill.