6:11 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 28 degrees, wind N 2 mph. Sky: an evolving canopy of clouds, mackerel, at first, blue-gray slashed with light; then, opens into a gilded fleet, scudding southeast; finally, shuts down, the sun hidden, the morning dimmed. Permanent streams: both holding patterns, otter and weasel tracks eroded and expanding, filling with the forest's scraps—allusions to their authors. Wetlands: sans bobcat . . . but not the memory of bobcat, silent as smoke, out for a walk through the alders . . . four days ago. Now, bins in hand, I slowly scan the edge of the marsh, where hemlock boughs brush the snow. Pond: tiny, tiny hail on the ground between the marsh and the pond, peters out uphill, unsubstantial as an eyelash.
Volume turned up on neighborhood airways. Broadcasting loudly and harshly, crows on the wing. Everywhere, chickadees whistle. Song stimulates song, back and forth across the road, an unaccompanied, uninterrupted chorus of one. The politeness of chickadees, first one bird and then the next . . . not at all like a faculty meeting. The unmusic of white-breasted nuthatches to the marsh and back. One hapless nuthatch dead-on-road, first DOR of the winter, a windshield victim. Bird idles in the cup of my hand. What I see: tiny-tail banded white; yam-colored undertail coverts; white stripe on the base of the primaries, bordered on the inside by black, on the outside by twilight gray. The back toe, the hallux (the little piggy that went to market), more prolonged and stouter than the other three toes, big sickle-shaped toenail, a grappling hook that enables nuthatch to walk headfirst down a tree, an avian Spiderman.
Walking home, cocooned in the sounds of March, I realize bobcat—a beast of the five-second glimpse—has entered the realm of personal mythology. I conger him up, a trophy, a glorified memory, the way I conger up the golden rattlesnake with the chocolate bands, basking on the stone foundation of a long-forgotten house in the woods of Elmira, New York. Or, nearly fifty years ago, while hitchhiking cross-country, an eye-level scarlet tanager perched in a wretched downpour at a Wisconsin rest stop. My ride, a truck driver, had never before studied a bird except between slices of bread. Deliciously drenched, we returned to the truck, puddles at our feet, and headed west.