Fall magic comes...

There comes, in the waning days of August, a quickening. The pulse of the season lifts. Gone the slumbering days of heat, the slow moving weeks of July and August when time pooled and the drift of days slowed. Now the stream of time flows faster; urgency builds. There is something afoot. The world of the Northwoods is poised as if a deer on the edge of the forest, alert, taunt with a tension, wound tight, a coiled spring. Such is the time when autumn waits on the edge of our season; a tension builds, the spiraled spring coils tighter.

On the hardscrabble blacktop of county road the scent of fresh-cut crop hangs in the air, sweet-sour, dusty; the harvester works the field row by row, the reaper comes to gather. I am on roller skis, the faux cross country ski of aluminum shaft and rubber tires, a meager substitute for snow that will come, the snow and the cold, but on this day summer sun holds rule and late August heat blooms. But different. Something has changed. There is something in the air.

The calendar calls out summer but the air on this day is different. There is a freshness to it, a dryness, a purity as if more fully charged with oxygen, more vital than a week prior. To breathe it deep brings clarity and energy that the sullen heat of summer air cannot deliver.

The sound of my ski poles on tarmac taps out the rhythm of the day, a clickety-clackety staccato that marks my pace in the afternoon light. There is an old maxim in the ski world that states that races are won in the summertime when the devotee logs the long hours in training and that the miles and hours in the summer will serve well come times of snow and races.

I think of that on this afternoon: Races are won in summer. In my case, so too are they lost in that time, when discipline and desire are, for me, as rare as snow in August and as fleeting as the winter wind yet to come. So it goes. There were days when I loved to ski and lived to ski. Now I love to ski but I no longer live to ski.

Time was when I would ski daily; log the long distance and the high intensity. Those days are gone to memory, gone as the summer heat of July and August and the long hours of slow-moving daylight, gone now to the quickening pace of the oncoming season. I plod along on roller skis but am lackadaisical in my effort and indifferent also to any gains. Things change.

Things change. In a matter 45 minutes on roller skis on a late summer afternoon shows that change. The calendar holds more weeks of summer but autumn looms, edging its way into our lives, shouldering out summer like the bully on the schoolyard cuts in line.

Autumn comes as if a magician unveiling the most powerful sleight of hand known, for autumn seems to change the measure of time. Autumn works a strange magic: Days pass faster, hours speed, time hastens. Magic! Magic on every day when the dawning brings coolness and freshness and the air is fuller and more enervated with life. Magic, again. For we know, all of us, that the air is the same and that the minutes to the hour do not change and the hours in the day are predictable. Intellect reminds us; magic disagrees.

Come September, comes magic in the rapid turn of days, in the intoxicating freshness of air, in the chill at dawn and the coolness that reaches with the shadows at dusk; magic on the wings of the migrating birds, in the unspeakable mystery and majesty of monarch butterfly gone to Mexico, of trout in vivid color moving over gravel against the current. See magic in the rose color of apple and plum, ripening on the tree, racing the season.

And the final act of the magic show of autumn: Green leaf turns to red or yellow or orange, turns in magic before our eyes. And then, poof, is gone and bare branch is all that remains.

I think these thoughts on the afternoon on the well-worn blacktop that rises with the folds of land that passes field and forest, houses and lakes I think of the magic to come. The roller skiing is a hollow exercise when all is said and done, a vain attempt to capture the reality of the actual experience but coming up short in the same way that an August day can only hint at the magic to come. One needs to stand on a September afternoon in sun and glory of fall color, stand to breathe in full the air that by logic is a match for the air of July but by dint of magic is vastly different.
On the morning after I roller ski I build a duck blind on a small lake. The air has a feel that was not there a week ago. Wood ducks take flight and sound their odd whistling call and then are gone. Across the lake a single tree shows a splash of red. The quickening of season change rises. The magic begins.

Season changes take flight on the wings of the birds.

“The birds lift eyes to skyscape as if reading ancient scrollwork etched in fine calligraphy across the blue expanse of August sky; blind to us, a billboard to them.” 

BY MITCH MODE
Special to the Star Journal

Black-coated grackles fly to the ground. They command the yard, stalking with authority, feathers glowing ebony as if spit-shined; yellow eye stark contrast to black head; beams as if lighted from within. Eight of them. They were not here the day prior. Green grass, black-jacketed grackles. It as is a drift of black leaf has come to earth on a gentle August breeze. They are restless, ill at ease. It is time.

It is the time of season when birds seem unsettled, sorting out their numbers to become flocks, wary of something unseen. The birds know the season is changing, sense in shortening days what we can only surmise from blocks and numbers on the calendar page; season change is in the air, is in the breeze, is in the sun as it sets earlier each day. Change comes now, weighted as the evening sky is weighted with a haziness of uncertainty. Change comes; the birds feel it. The birds announce it.

We have no real clue. We blunder our way through the natural world blind to the subtle shift, oblivious to the fractional movements, unaware of patterns etched in sunsets and sunrises that mark the calendar of birds.

The birds know. We do not. The birds feel it and see it, see the landscape blur as if mirage, then reform and crystallize into the new season. The birds lift eyes to skyscape as if reading ancient scrollwork etched in fine calligraphy across the blue expanse of August sky; blind to us, a billboard to them.

We feed birds. Have a couple feeders in the back yard, watch them over the kitchen table; early morning coffee with birds; dinner and late evening, watching the birds in the yard. The bird feeders draw birds as well as gray squirrels and chipmunks. Rabbits hunch in the grass, picking at leftovers and scraps.

We are not bird watchers as much as watchers of birds. There is a difference in that, a bird watcher or a watcher of birds. We watch the birds in the yard, flashes of color and movement, not for counting or the listing of them but for the moment when they sit still, eyes bright, alert, poised between flight and feed, between grass and air. For that moment, that instant is what remains and is what is important.

We are watchers of birds. We watch red cardinal and blurred-wing hummers, long-tailed brown thrashers and smooth-bodied doves; grosbeaks and finches, all manner and form of backyard birds in the aviary of our yard.

Now, at summer’s end, they are restless in a manner that they have not been until this week. Now there is a skittishness to them beyond the caution of their normal ways. Now there is something happening and we do not know the feeling, cannot feel the sensations, cannot feel the way they feel. Only, in our minds, can we recognize it for what it is: Season change. It comes to us on the wings of birds large and small.

The grosbeaks, rose-breasted, were at the feeder, heavy bills looking vaguely mechanical, crushing seed. They’ll leave soon; the tropics call. They shared the feeder with chickadees, the juvenile birds looking vaguely unkempt and shaggy; they’ll stay, no tropics for them; bitter cold and snow their lot.

The hummingbirds come to the feeder, sip, pull back, move in and sip some more. They will be on their way soon. I watch the ants climb the side of the garage and out over the metal hook that holds the hummingbird feeder then down the light gauge chain to the feeder. The promised land! How they sense that there is sugar water there as they stand with little ant feet in the sand on the ground, how they know that and how they know how to get there, that is mystery to me.

But climb they do and down the sides of the feeder to the faux red flowers that the hummers feed from and there the ants, many of them, driven by gluttony or desire (one can only speculate on little ant brains and how they process things) crawl into the channel to the sugar water, drown and float to the surface of the feeder. It is thick with their black bodies layering the surface of the sweetened water like peppercorns.

I stood watching the other night, inches away from a doomed ant and of a sudden there was a whirring sound and the hummingbird was there, twelve, maybe fifteen inches from my face. I did not move a muscle. The bird fed, pulled back and I could feel the breeze from its wings. It came to the feeder, fed again and then was gone into the greenery of lilac and shrub and I stood in awe of it all.

And soon they leave us, the hummingbirds and the grackles, the grosbeaks and brown thrashers. Soon gone and the yard will be empty of their song and their vitality and their life and all that will remain is the memory of them.

I watch the evening skies now as sun lowers to the west. I am waiting for the August flight of nighthawks. It happens every August about now, flocks of nighthawks on their steady migration southward. On those nights there will be a dozen birds, then a dozen more and a score more than that and they will be swooping and drifting in the gathering dusk, moving south as if on a byway in the clouds that they alone can see, a steady flow of them.

I will stand, head tipped back, eyes to the sky and I will watch the birds and I will wonder of the mystery of migration and their travel into the unknown and unknowable. Then night’s curtain will drop and the birds will be lost to blackness and gone into the night and into their pilgrimage south and summer, when the birds are gone, will be gone with them.

Paddling into the storm.

Sunday afternoon, a day of muggy heat and distant clouds, building and rising, and a chance, hours off, of storm. We turned our backs on work that should be done; it would wait, tasks and “To Do” lists, they can always wait. We loaded canoes, stowed paddles and PFDs, drove the dark blacktop to the landing. Made ready to paddle.

Sally’s canoe is a wisp of a boat, built of a dark lamination and on the water it floats like a raven’s feather. A touch of irony: The near-black canoe is named Trillium; the pure white flower of spring. My canoe, longer and sleek, muted yellow-green tint of Kevlar; named Magic.

We put boats to water, pushed off, paddled against the light current, the breeze at our backs. Paddles rose and fell in an easy rhythm like a metronome marking the song of our paddles, measuring the pulse of the effort.

To our left the land rose steep to a ridge and on the ridge were trees, thick and green; underneath them, dark shadows. High above the ridge clouds lifted up, white and not-white, transition clouds moving to gray, building and towering. Below, in the valley of the river, we could see very little of the cloud; the horizon was closed down by the lift of jagged tree line and most all we could see was overhead. The sun was yielding to the cloud, giving ground in the battle of light against shadow.

Eagle flew overhead, wings strong, flight direct. Mergansers and wood ducks lifted from the shallows, high tempo wing beat in the heavy air weighted by humidity. The trailing breeze rose and dropped, uncertain in purpose. It was a pleasant afternoon to paddle.

We paddled upstream for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes; time was not important on this day. Then we drifted, paddles spanning the rails of the canoes, decided to turn back.

The clouds now owned the sky, layers of gray built up as washes of watercolor paints on paper; a light wash of gray, another, one more and again until the thin layers accumulated to heavy and dark and, all of a sudden, slightly ominous. In the distance a roll of thunder, faint, indistinct. Or was it truck, rolling on the highway, rumbling and groaning, too distant to describe with certainty?

We paddled into the breeze, gentle enough not to be a hindrance.

The sun was now gone to cloud and cloud going to darkness. Now the sound of thunder is coming on, unmistakable. The roll of distant thunder bears a comfort in the warning it gives; far off thunder gives notice of intent, one has time to prepare. The rumble of thunder closing in is a different story altogether; a warning of impending storm.

The metronome of our paddle song lifted, quicker turnover, higher tempo, upbeat rhythm. The canoes lifted and moved as birds on the wind.

We paddled with a sense of purpose now, edging toward urgency. No time to dawdle; there was storm rising, unseen to the west, unseen for us in the valley of the river where the trees angled to the sky and we could not see to the horizon from where the power and the storm gathered and advanced toward us.

Thunder; closer now, a fundamental sound carried in the roll of thunder. There are few sounds in nature more evocative than thunder, there at the dawning of time; there, likely at the end.

Behind us, upriver toward Rhinelander, fist-shaped clouds rose one atop the other. Downriver, to the landing, the sky was a mottled study of gray, dark and not-so-dark gray, layered and jumbled but gray, all gray and darkening and filled with the threat – no, with the promise now of storm.

Thunder again, the percussive backbeat of power and storm, sounding as the sound of rock tumbling and crashing, of avalanche, of landslide, of power and fury.

The landing was just ahead, around the corner. A few minutes more.
There came a stillness. The water went flat. We had 300 yards to paddle.

A lightning bolt hit on the other side of the ridge; a cannon shot of thunder at nearly the same instant: Flash! Bang! Thunder cracked like a vault door slammed shut, the sound of finality. The tree tops were in sudden turmoil of twisting and swaying, wildly tossed like wild swans in a mad rush to take flight, an explosion of wildness and fury, chaos and confusion and through it all the demon’s roar of wind that matched the wild beast of your worst nightmare.

The wind hit us like a collision and the canoes were suddenly out of control as if spinning on ice, pushed toward shore, the paddle near torn from my hands. Then rain, torrents of it, sheets of it, heavy and strong, falling straight down as curtain falls, a steel curtain, gray-white and slashing down.

We were pushed to shore, canoes now flotsam, powerless to the storm. Canoes ran aground. We left them, ran for shelter under an old white pine. The storm raged. It was dark as sundown.

I cannot say how long it lasted, cannot guess at the term of the storm’s anger. But in time it passed, the sky lightened and the sound of the storm was gone. With it, the rain and wind.

I walked to the canoe, to the Magic; paddled the three minutes to the landing. So close.

Suddenly very tired, I leaned on my paddle. To the west, a glimmer of sun. To the east, black of the storm was moving away, a lumbering beast taking leave. Arched across the sky, vivid color against the dark clouds a long arching rainbow.

Of predators and prey...

We never planted the garden. Springtime got away from us, blown to tatters on April snows and a too-fast moving May. The garden was ignored, then forgotten. It lies fallow, overgrown with weed and daisy, raised beds holding neglect and ruin, standing as relics of good intention gone to seed. Weeds of questionable provenance reach for the sun, grow high and thick and mysterious. What plants these? From where were the seeds borne? What will their richness yield?

Into this thicket Sally ventured last week, hacking back some of the growth in a vain attempt at, certainly not order, that is gone to the weeds, but perhaps a measure of control of the wild greenery. Into the green tangle she worked under June skies and a sun of crazy heat.

Something moved. Something small, hidden in bowed-over grasses amid tangle of stem and stalk. She paused, did Sally.

A sound, soft as a raindrop. A shadow that became a form. The form that moved into a ray of light and took shape, definition: Rabbit. A very small, very young rabbit, of large, damp eyes and small ears folded back as if blades of grass. Sally and rabbit stood, eye to eye across the garden gone bad; neither moved.

Then Sally took a slow, purposeful step backward; another, soft footfall on yielding dirt. Another, until she was at the gate. She opened the gate, stepped into the yard and clicked shut the latch.

She told me about it after work and took me to the garden. “It was right about here.” We stood in the shambles of the garden, the garden of high hopes gone bad. “Right over there.” There was nothing.

She moved to one of the raised beds that should be bearing ripening tomatoes but instead lies matted with weed; took a soft step forward. A shrill, high squeal rose to the air and a small rabbit blurred from under her foot and ran. Then a second. A third. Sally, with no intent to harm, had stepped on their nest.

The three rabbits huddled motionless in the weeds, eyes bright, hoping against all odds that in their motionlessness they would become invisible.

We backed out of the garden and peered over the chain link fence. The babies seemed to be as small statues of rabbit.
We left the garden, went to the house, kept the dogs inside. Half an hour later we peeked over the fence. They were gone.

Fenway figured it out. Fenway, the Boston terrier, the Boston terrible, the Boston rocket, Fenway gamed it, found the scent of rabbit and knew what it was. Thor and Riika, born and bred to hunt, my twosome of field and forest missed it. Fenway did not. Where we saw little bunnies cute as the day is long, Fenway saw something else: Prey!
He hunted them, did Fen, hunted with a zeal and an intensity that matched the rising heat of early summer days. We moved to protect the rabbits, made noise when we let the dogs out, the better to alarm the rabbits to flight. We tried.

Fenway’s obsession ran torrid as the June temperatures, spiking red-hot into the danger zone, an obsession no less real and no more appealing than the ugly heat, for name any one obsession that, at its heart, is anything but unattractive.

In a crackling hot afternoon he rushed manic and crazy-wild, coursed the perimeter of garden fence like a perverse inmate at the high wire; Fenway wanted in, not out. He dug at the base of the fence like a badger, his efforts for naught. He ran the wire, whined and barked. I imagined small rabbits cowering in fear in the garden.

He overheated. A Boston terrier cannot regulate heat well and lives vulnerable to the baking heat of open sky and burning sun. He was panting deep and fast and his body burning is as if with fever. Sally and I carried him to the basement sink, held him under cool running water, dampened him down as the chill water carried the heat away and he returned to normal. We put him to the floor. He shook himself off then ran the stairs, stood at the back door and whined to be let out again.
We told him “No,” and he looked at us with big dark eyes as if we have betrayed his very reason for life.

He did not give up. After it cooled he bounced across the yard, springing high for a better sight line, running side-to-side, crisscrossing the yard as if a pinball in the old machines propelled by paddles, a blur of movement; up, down, right side, left side, down the middle. He was enervated by memory of rabbits, driven mad with the scent in the air, that mystery world that we can only imagine, the world of scent in which dogs live and revel in and that can write them a story line that only they can read.

He was driven to wildness and abandon by the intoxicating scent of rabbit and in that intoxication rendered powerless to its draw and allure as all those intoxicated are; a common thread, dog to human.

We’d sometimes see the small rabbits slide from shadow and cover into the yard as shadows might move from darkness to light. We’d rap the windows, put them to flight, do what we could to prevent carnage.
Good intentions can only go so far. On a hot summer evening under glowering cloud with distant thunder sounding a drum beat, a rabbit came into the yard. We missed it. Fenway did not.

Rabbits are rabbits; they do what they can. Dogs are dogs; they do what they will. Blood runs deep with both; instinct carries the day. Prey and predator; they cannot escape lineage, cannot run from bloodline, cannot dodge DNA from which comes intensity, desire and obsession, from which is determined predator and prey, from where comes life and comes death.

Boundary Waters: All trips are good, not all are great.

We paddled north by northeast on Jackfish Bay under clear skies and a rising wind that had tree tops in turmoil. The wind was hard from the west and we held tight to the lee shore where we would find calmer waters. Should we stray too far out the wind would catch us and the canoe would be at its mercy.

We’d put in at Mudro Lake in the middle of the Boundary Waters. It was a busy place. A group from Kansas. A trio of young guys in one canoe. A couple from Missouri, Rob and Mary. They were dating, in the middle of a budding relationship. A true test of a relationship is how well a couple travels together. That and a second challenge: How well does a couple do in a tandem canoe? Rob and Mary rolled the dice, traveling and paddling both.

Under blue skies and a budding wind, we paddled out, portaged to Sandpit Lake with the threesome in their canoe and Rob and Mary. Then we went our separate ways and turned easterly toward Jackfish Bay. We passed two campsites on the southern end of Jackfish; fishermen at both. Then we were on our own. We would not see another person that day.

Jackfish Bay is a lobe of Basswood Lake and Basswood Lake is big water, near 25,000 acres. If the wind was coming from the north or east we’d not have attempted to paddle it. The westerly winds were to our left and we were sheltered by a buffer of trees and hills.

We paddled north, five miles, maybe six. Then a gap in the sheltering lee shore opened and the wind hit us like a fist. The wind caught the canoe, turned it and for a moment there was a gut-shot of panic.

Looking across the half mile gap of lake to the far side, the lake was wild with white-capped waves. Decision time; head into the heavy chop or pull up. Our canoe is named Northwind, a nod to its seaworthiness. The canoe would handle the big water. Could we?

We turned into the wind. The canoe stalled; the waves rolled. Then we started to move, arms and shoulders straining. The canoe responded and we slowly eased away from the land behind into the rage of wind and wave.

It took time but we made the far shore and found shelter of pine and spruce. We caught our breath. Then we turned north and paddled another hour.

We camped above Basswood Falls. I started a fire, coaxed it to life and full flame and controlled fury. The fire burned down and we cooked tenderloin steaks over the coals.

Across the open water was Canada. It was peaceful. We did not see another person that night. When the sound of the wind calmed we could hear the sustained thunder of Basswood Falls.

Next morning we paddled to the portage at Basswood Falls. The portage is a mile long. There is no easy way to walk a mile while carrying a pack and balancing a canoe, no matter how light, on one’s shoulders. I walked a slow mile. Then I put the canoe down, shrugged off the pack and headed back to the head of the portage. There were two more packs and I carried them down. Down and back and down again; three miles.

We met a pair of young guys from Florida, doing a west-to-east route that would end, if all went well, at Lake Superior; 220 miles total, the one said, maybe 230. They were behind schedule and worried about their progress.

We stopped mid afternoon just below the maelstrom of Wheelbarrow Falls and above the short gorge of Lower Basswood Falls. We found wild roses and a single pink lady slipper, delicate pinks at odds with the harsh land.

I had slept poorly the first night, slept worse the second. On the third morning I woke tired after a restless night. We started late and paddled the Horse River to Horse Lake then portaged to Fourtown Lake. It was early afternoon and the wind was angry, a sea of whitecaps ahead.

We considered things; cross the lake into the wind or not? We decided not to and turned south, found a campsite. I was exhausted. I lay in the sun on the grass and fell asleep. I woke chilled, had no appetite and went to bed at dusk. In the dark of night I spiked a fever and woke to a sweat-wet sleeping bag and a daybreak decision: Push on or head in?

We had two more nights on our permit. I was feeling bad but not terrible. But what to gain? What to risk? In the end we paddled out and drove to Ely.

The following day we took the canoe for a short trip to Hegman Lake where a set of pictographs is painted on the rock face on the north end of the lake. There is mystery and power in the pictographs, painted hundreds of years ago. Rusty orange, small but of a majesty far greater than size alone. In our odd age when bombastic posturing seems the norm I find solace in looking at the silent work of an unknown artist that has stood for ages and will for ages yet to come.

We let the canoe ride easy and looked at the pictographs a long time. Then we turned for Ely and the next day for home.

A few days later we had dinner with friends. I explained the odd circumstances of my maladies. “Sounds like when I had Lyme’s,” he said.

Two days later a blood test; next day the result: Positive for Lyme disease.

MAGIC ON THE WATER...

I remain, in one of the constants of my fragmented life, enthralled by the magical and enchanting drift of small craft over deep water, the wonder of a canoe or kayak afloat in the thin water film, seeming to defy all we take as certain. We are creatures of land, crawled out of the muck of eons past, able to swim only with rudimentary strokes and little grace (think otters for comparison). We are tethered to the earth as if with leaden feet unable to take flight (think any common bird). We are so suited for land that we may as well grow roots.

Given our unwieldy bulk and weight we will sink like the proverbial rock should we venture out over deep water, giving up to gravity and impaired buoyancy any attempt to stay afloat save for mighty thrashing about as our puppies did when we put them to water; head up, eyes wide, paws reaching for purpose, finding none, splashing desperately. We were no more made for water than for winged flight.

Enter small craft. Enter to our lives kayaks and canoes. In their fold we defy all that we take as dogma and the craft becomes as a wizard’s flying carpet of ancient lore and legend.

There is primal thrill in pushing a small boat off, away from the firmness of ground, over the sandy shallows, to the place where the water grows dim, then darker, then black beneath the boat. We, the boat and I, are afloat.

The sky above lifts to infinity; unanswerable questions on that rise. The dark water sinks to blackness; endless mystery there. For all we know it goes to center earth. The canoe (for I have spent time in a canoe of late) rides the balance of the two, the dark water mystery and the high sky questions, floats between two worlds like the center of a balance scale; weights equal.

A few weeks ago we paddled with a convivial group on the Rum River, near Princeton, Minn., Princeton being the home of Northstar Canoes that put the outing together. It was my first time this season in a canoe, an act of tardiness that would seem unconscionable except that April had run off the rails in terms of predictability and historical precedent and time normally spent on the water was better served by an amazing run of late season cross country skiing. Given lemons one best make lemonade and skiing filled the glass full in that regard.

We paddled near 20 miles that day which sounds somewhat heroic but must be tempered with the simple fact that the Rum was in flood with late snowmelt and the current surged and carried us along like frisky colts on May’s breezes. We could have covered the twenty in a raft should we have wished, though the mere thought of trading a canoe for a raft seems a sacrilegious exercise even in passing.

It was a good day. High sun brought heat and mild burn. Ducks flushed from the edges of the Rum; woodies and mallards and an occasional merganser. Warblers flashed in jeweled glory; an eagle watched us pass, holding its ground, unconcerned. The current moved silent but strong; canoes rode easy, paddles flashing in the sun.

They say the Rum was so named because early settlers thought the color of the water looked like rum which may say something about their vivid imaginations. Then again I’ve often thought the tannin stained water in this area looks like root beer though no river that I know of carries that for a name.

It felt good to be back in a canoe.

Toward evening we had hamburgers and grilled asparagus and mushrooms skewered and cooked on the grill. After dinner we stopped, Sally and I, on a side street in Princeton for ice cream at the oddly named Saint Lucia’s Ice Cream to top the day.

Two weeks later on a weekday afternoon on a hot spring day I took my own canoe out. It is a Northstar canoe that Sally got me for my birthday last year. It is called, appropriately enough, the Magic for what else is a canoe ‘cept for magic?

I put the canoe to water on the Wisconsin River downstream from town where the river runs wide and slow. I pushed off, over the narrow strand of gold colored sand next to shore. The canoe moved like a breath of wind across the shallows and out, over the dark water. I paddled slow and easy, got comfortable, picked up the pace and held it steady.

I was alone with my canoe and felt as if in the presence of enchantment and wonder. A good canoe floats on the water, not a part of it, not apart from it; floats like a needle in a compass, quivering as if with life, like the tail of a dog on point swinging and seemingly tentative but pointing, invariably, true. Follow the canoe as you follow a compass needle; all will be as it should. Follow it as you would a bird dog on scent; all will be well.

I followed my canoe that afternoon against a gentle current of moving water, over water in varied shades of darkness, from a blue-black to gunmetal charcoal to the color of root beer, under blue sky that showed cloud at the horizon.

Canoes are simple; no moving parts. My Magic is built of Kevlar and yet connects to bark canoes of ancient times in a way my pickup truck does not connect with a Model T. A good canoe is a simple solution to a complex problem, the problem being the complexities and vagaries of lives we lead.

We will never float in space, poised over eternity; we will never lift wings and fly. The best we can be is in a canoe over dark water, as if weightless, untethered, free in a way we can never be on solid ground. In this, magic.

Lady...

Lady was always the first one to wake. I’d walk downstairs in the dawning and turn on the lights in the kitchen. I’d start coffee and I’d hear a gentle meow and turn and Lady would be there, walking soft on little white cat feet, noiseless as a snowflake come to earth. The dogs would be sleeping; Sally still in bed. It was me and Lady in the time before sunrise.

I’d feed her. She’d eat some and then go off to find her way into the day. Later, Riika and Thor and Fenway would wake and come down; Sally as well. But the early morning time was me and Lady.

That was our routine, me and our cat, hot coffee in a dark house, moving slow and easy, waking to the day ahead.

Sally got her from the shelter in Minocqua. How many years back? We don’t know. Nineteen? Twenty? And she was not a newborn when Sally picked her up.

Sally had lost her old dog Jake and her remaining dog, Carley, was distraught. Carley would walk the house, looking for Jake, disturbed and unsettled at a life thrown out of kilter, a pack animal now solo. Sally got Lady to keep Carley company.

They were, dog and cat, as oil and water in the early going. They got over it.

Lady was an orange tabby color; Carley was nearly the same and they’d often lie close together and seem to merge, so similar their color. Cats are solitary animals; dogs, pack animals. Lady grew up as a dog, as part of the pack. She and Carley. Then with Riika, then Thor and then Fenway; her pack, our pack. Four of them the past half dozen years since Fenway joined and made it a quartet.

She was the senior member, sitting above on a table or chair, Sphinx-like, overlooking the others. She took them all in, allowed them into her domain. Lived with them all.

Fenway was the worst. He came to us at six pounds of Boston terrier wildness, too small to push the big dogs around. Thor towered over him, Riika cut him no slack. But in Lady he had a foil; small and dainty and sweet. He tormented her, yapping at her, tagging her with his blunt snout, backing her into a corner and not letting up.

She gave it back to him. Standing up to him, swatting him with her white-booted paws, punching at him like a bantamweight, rat-a-tat-tat, right-left-right-left, a blur of punches. She never gave ground.

They worked it out. She, the oldest of the pack, he the youngest; bookends.

They hunted, all four of them. The dogs hunted in a rush as gust of wind, all fury and force and movement, charging full bore at game in the yard, leaves scattering in their wake as if on November’s storm.

Lady hunted like winter; patient, efficient, cold. She’d lie in wait for chipmunk or bird, statue-like, still as a shadow. She’d wait. When the prey ventured out, cautious, then bolder – only then would she measure the distance, judge her effort and when the time was right, strike fast as a spark arcing a wire.

She had no malice, did Lady. Had no mean side, did not cause us headache or travail. She brought sweetness and calm to our lives, drifting room to room, light on her feet, easy on our laps. She never topped ten pounds, never grew chunky or awkward. Rarely did we call her “cat,” more often “kitten” for she seemed fixed in time as a young kitten, innocent and sweet.

And purring, purring so often it became part of her like a low rumble of a beating heart or the soft rush of pulse through veins.

She would find us in the evening, always lying with her head to our left. She would survey the room when we had people over, look, analyze and then casually but purposefully stroll over to the one person allergic to cats, spring from floor to chair as if gravity were held no bond, and then curl up in their lap and begin to purr. She inevitably turned her back to the person and faced the room as if to better take part in conversation.

She required very little care. We spent enough on vet bills with the dogs to put a child through an Ivy League school. Lady got by on kibble and treats and a pauper’s stipend. She required little else.

And so it went in our house, me and Sally and Lady and Riika, Thor and Fenway. A big pack, the six of us. So it went.

Two weeks ago she stopped purring. She stopped eating. I took her to the vet. She ran blood work; it came back clean. Kidneys fine, system fine, an old cat but good to go.

She seemed normal more than not. She moved well, went outside and prowled the yard with the dogs, came upstairs to our bed. But she did not eat much, she had problems taking food in.

I took her back to the vet. Another exam. A different result.

Cancer.

A tumor under her tongue made eating difficult. A scenario of what would come that nobody needs to hear. We held her close, held our little kitten. She was losing weight, wasting away.
It is not a matter of knowing what to do. That is easy. It is a matter of knowing when. That is gut wrenching.

Spring warmth came late this year. On a sunny day Lady went to the backyard and soaked up the sun, she and the dogs. And she purred again, not long, not loud, but purred nonetheless. It was a good day.

The vet came to the house in the afternoon, bag in hand. We said goodbye to our Lady.

We buried Lady on high ground in a place dappled by the spring sun. We can sit there and look to the west, feel the breeze across the lake, watch the sunset, listen to the sound of wind in the trees, close our eyes; imagine the sound of purring.

Early birds...late winter...

The birds come as a rush of wind, delicate wings aflutter, small bodies in flight. One minute the bush is empty; the next, alive with birds, chattering like a group of friends long apart. Their backs are the color of bark and it looks as if the stems of the bush have come alive. Their bellies are buff colored and on the crown and breast of some a smudge of rose, the color of a spring tulip. The rose colors are faint in the shade, vivid in the sun.

They pause as if to consider the situation at hand, then drop from branch and stem to the feeders. The sack-type feeders take the life and movement of the small birds, take their colors; the color of tree bark and dried weed.

The birds feed ravenously. On the ground a pure white cover of new snow, eighteen inches or more, pushed and given shape and flow by the wind, rising up as if a wave captured in white time. Overhead the sky breaks toward patchy blue. The wind has died after the storm, spent by the effort.

The birds jostle for position on the feeders. They feed with a desperation uncommon on most days, birds driven to eat to survive.

Then the small birds burst into unexpected movement and fury, taking flight as windblown leaves. Two, three, bump the window and the sound is like summer storm bringing hail against the glass panes.

There is a blur of fast-moving shape, too fast to make out then forming and taking definition: A hawk.

The hawk cuts the air like a scythe, an arcing cut, swift and true with a cutting edge that is merciless and honed, the wrath of nature’s god. The hawk banks across the yard in its sweep and lands in the lilac. It perches, tall and upright, a judge on a bench. The birds have scattered; the yard is empty save the hawk. The hawk has missed its strike. It sits, miffed at the turn of events, a batter that has swung and whiffed and now sulks on the pine.

Then the hawk takes wing and is gone.

It is a hard season for the birds. Natural food lies buried; the winter does not end; stored up reserves on the small bodies diminishes each day; survival is not a certainty.

I leave the house and go skiing under warming temperatures and a clearing sky. It is odd to be skiing in mid April and to be doing so on some of the best conditions of the season. Odd or not, I ski; when given snow one must ski in the same manner as when given a lemon one must consider lemonade.

I drive home and pull the truck to the driveway, turn it off, step out, pause. There are feathers on the driveway and feathers on the backyard mud, tufts of down in the puddle of snow melt, all like dandelion seed tossed to the breeze. They are dove feathers. The hawk has struck; the hawk has killed, and the feathers lie, light as air, heavy as doom.

The hawk is nowhere to be seen.The small birds crowd the feeders.

The next morning the birds come after daybreak, again the gust of birds, the flutter of activity, the bark-backed birds on limb and feeder.

Birds drop from branch to ground, folding wings tight to body and giving fall to gravity, spreading wings at the last second and landing on the snow. Feed has fallen from the feeders. The birds pick at it. They are still very hungry.

One bird edges to the side, hops toward fallen seed. It alone of the small birds is fluffed up as if against the chill. The other birds are slim and sleek, the single bird rounded, ball-like. The bird moves tentatively, uncertain of direction. I watch it from the kitchen window, tell Sally, “That one does not look good”.

The bird hops, pauses, seems to eat, hops again. Then sits still in the golden sun of morning sky.

I stand and walk across the kitchen, fill my coffee cup and return, glance out the window.

The bird is dead.

The bird has died in the time I am gone, died in a private act without spectators which is as it should be. It lies on its side on the glistening bier of crystalline snow that catches the morning sun. It will be a warm spring day. It will be a day when optimism returns to the land. It will be a day of revival after the storm of winter that has come in spring. But the bird will not see it.

The next day I find a small bird the color of stone in the corner of the front steps as if blown by the wind into a small drift. The day after, two more.

Do they die from food gone bad? Do they die from the cold? Do they die for simply having worn out after surviving the bitter cold and the long nights and the too-short days? It would be easy, the latter, easy to give up, to simply wear out and give up life to the white shroud of snow come too late and too heavy.

We watch the birds, the flocks that come to the feeders like wind storm comes to the trees and the sky. We watch them as they pulse with life, eyes bright in the light of April sunshine, full of energy and vitality. They come every day, birds of a feather.

But as we watch we remember, remember the swift flight of hawk, remember the slow-coming death of the bird on snow, remember how perilous life can be. We know that winter is the mightiest raptor of all, sweeping like a scimitar, cutting without regard, without mercy, without pause, silent wings and razor talons over fresh fallen snow under April skies in this longest of winters.

April in a winter that will not end.

Not much makes sense any more. ‘Least not with the seasons and with the weather. Not this time around. March came in like a lamb; left like a lion with an attitude, leaving the biggest snowfall of the season in its wake.

Then April took the stage. Those cute little Easter dresses lost some impact given that they had to be paired with knee-high pac boots and Kromers. Easter egg hunts, out-of-doors style, were lost to snowdrifts.

April showers? Not seein’ them so far. Unless you count the snowfalls last week and I don’t think that’s what was what they meant, whoever it was that came up with the “April showers bring May flowers” doggerel. Two below zero this Sunday when the sun peaked its way cautiously over the eastern horizon, as if reluctant to see what the night had wrought; surprised that it didn’t turn tail and drop back into darkness.

We saw robins in the sumac trees two nights prior, feeding on dried red fruit as sunset came down. Two days later and below zero temperatures and no robins to be seen. One has to wonder if they hunkered down and toughed it out or froze to death in the dark of night. I’ve seen woodcock the past week, worm feeders whose long bills probe soft mud for food, seen them in the seepage of small springs and along the open water on the river, looking for those patches of thawed dirt trying to eke out enough to survive. Saw two of them the morning after the below zero temps; survivors.

So what do you do when April locks down with cold and snow and there seems no hope at any turn? When the day dawns to chill and the wind rises from the north? When all cheer and optimism seems lost? You deal with it. That’s all. You deal with it.

You deal with it by accepting that over which you have no power and then, best that I can think of, you go outside and enjoy it. You accept the late, lingering winter because you can do nothing else. Accept it, deal with it, get on with life.

Wednesday I drove the truck as far as I could, parked it, stepped out into untracked snow. Cinched tight the bindings on the snowshoes and set off. I walked old roads that I have not set foot on since grouse season, plodding along on snowshoes under the high sun of an April day. It struck me, the absurdity of it, snowshoeing in deep, new snow under a springtime sky.

I walked to the river valley. Two weeks ago I’d skied on crust snow over hard ice and the river was but an open ski trail to me and I skied with sheer joy. Now the ice was gone and moving water glistened blue and cold. I walked upriver. Two chickadees kept pace, flitting as if weightless from low branch to ground and back. Shelf ice lay in disarray, fractured and broken, heavy slabs of ice tilted to river water.

There were geese on the river, geese and some early ducks. They watched me with suspicion; the geese held, the mergansers took flight. Then sandhill cranes, two of them, in shallow water. They were silver gray sporting a vivid red crown. They watched me. I moved closer, slow stepping.

They gave me some ground then took wing. The sun lit them as if there were chromed. Then gone save for the ancient call that echoed back across the river air.

Next day I skied. Skied on a warming afternoon under cloudless skies, skied where I’d skied for the first time of the season way back in December. I did not ski fast, did not ski pretty, just skied for the simple happiness of being able to ski. The trail conditions were very good, the tracks set deep and firm. It was as if I was in February and spring was coming on.
How odd it has become, this weather, this season that now has neither definition nor normalcy. How strange these days.

But here is what it comes down to: On those days, the snowshoe day and the ski day, on both those days I was struck speechless by the beauty of it all. On those days the sun shone on glistening white snow that covered the woods and open areas and the snow was sculpted by the wind and flowed like water would flow, smooth and easy and without form.

And the pure white snow lay upon the land and the bare trees stood tall in contrast to the snow and it was gorgeous. It was jaw dropping gorgeous. That is all. And that is everything.
On Sunday I watched a live video feed of a bicycle race in Europe. I thought to myself that it would be nice to ride now, ride in the glory and wonder of springtime, push unused leg muscles till they ached, to feel the spring air, to see the spring woods.

Or canoeing; it would be good to get out in the canoe. I have a new one, got it last fall, hardly got it wet back then. The canoe is as light as a dream, as solid as a promise, as full of wonder as a smile. It would be nice to dust that boat off and wet it down and paddle into the new season.

It would be nice if the weather would edge up and the veins of the maple trees would swell with sugar sap and run and flow and become syrup, rich and sweet.

All this would be nice. All would be appropriate. All would be as it should.

For now, a pause. For now a lingering winter that defies the norm and offers fresh snow under springtime skies. For now a time to consider what we have, to deal with it as we can, to wait for change.

For now, a time of testing our spirit.

Chronic Wasting Disease...questions without answers...

The last week of February was heavy with thaw. The sun rose higher in clear skies and brought warmth that was not there 30 days prior. In the house Fenway, the Boston terrier, and Lady, the cat, found the places where the sun shone through south-facing windows.

Slept, the two of them, in the amber of late winter sun, taking in the sun and the heat as if sustenance that would bring renewal as it will with the earth that wakes with the warming that spreads as a benevolent bloom until spring is here.

I drove to the woodlot in the late morning on roads wet with snowmelt. The snow still lay deep and pure along the road.

I parked the truck on the edge of the blacktop, walked to the back, pulled out a pair of snowshoes, tightened the bindings. Then I put the blacktop to my back and walked into the familiar landscape.

Hillside rose ahead of me. I thought: Last time I walked this was deer season. Not much snow then.

I walked slowly. One does not skim the surface of snow on snowshoes, not like the water spiders in summer. Snowshoes sink some; effort moves them forward. I walked patiently, looking at the land, scouting.

There was some deer sign, not much but some. I noted it. Deer, come winter, do not much use this land; not enough food and a bad acorn crop last year didn’t help. Turkey tracks, some deer track, not much else.

The snow was deep and it was an effort to walk. Still, it was a good day to be outside. Though one has to think most days are good days to be outside.

The deer stood out; blocky brown shape against white snow. It was bedded in the sun. Head up, ears cocked, eyes meeting mine. I stopped, stood still.

The deer was nervous. It stood, turned, and moved away. Buck or doe, I couldn’t tell. Most bucks have dropped antlers by now. The deer bounded then slowed and walked, looking back, snow midway to its belly.

I watched it and thought: Do I come back tomorrow and kill it?

Do I come back the next day, March 1, with a legal tag in my pocket and my deer rifle in my hand and kill that deer, or, for that matter, any other? Do I come back to kill a late-winter deer so the deer can be tested for Chronic Wasting Disease?

A wild deer tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) this past rifle season on the north edge of Lincoln County and ever since then I’ve felt a cloud of low hanging dread over my days. Chronic Wasting Disease. It kills every deer that contracts the disease. Every single one. It is indiscriminate; it kills bucks and does, yearlings and adults, kills every blessed one that comes down with it.

A few years ago, in Washburn County, northwest of here, a deer returned a positive result. Since then over 2,000 deer in that area have been tested. None had the disease.

The buck that tested positive in Lincoln County was near the Camp 10 ski area. It was the first wild deer in this area that came up positive. But testing is voluntary and last year in Lincoln County only 37 deer were tested. In Oneida County, 179.

To get an accurate idea of the percentage of deer that are positive for CWD in this area far more tests are needed. To get a sample to start off the DNR offered kill tags to landowners near where the positive deer was killed. They want to kill perhaps 50, maybe 75 to get a baseline. My land is in that zone.

On that sunny day in late February with the promise of winter’s end in the air I looked at that deer with new eyes. I had the next day off. Should I come back, rifle in hand?

I knew I should, knew I should take a deer for testing, knew above all else that we need to know if the disease is established or not, knew that the only way to do that is to take deer, sooner rather than later. Take them and test them and hope for the best. I knew that. I knew I should shoot a deer and take it in for testing.

And knew with equal certainty that in my gut I did not want to do it. Knew I found it distasteful. Knew, as I wrote to a friend, that I’d feel more a hit man than a hunter. Knew that a late winter deer is a survivor and deserves to see springtime.

Knew that at my age I do not care if I shoot another deer; I’ve taken as many as I need. But knew also that the future of the deer herd and the deer hunt for the next generation needs to be secured. CWD would be a blight across the land. I knew we needed facts. And facts come from testing deer.

I thought this out as I snowshoed back to the truck. I thought of it that evening as sun went down. My rifle stood in the corner, ready; my deer hunt gear close by; cartridges gleamed softly, their brass dull in the light.

The moon that night rose, near full. It brought light but not clarity.

Certain questions bear no easy answers. And on nights when questions rage, the darkness seems a shroud and the light of the moon a charade and sleep does not come easy.

Birkie...times 40.

 

February 28, 2018

“Maybe it was that in 40 years I’d seen skiers come and go, friends who skied with me, friends that I may see once a year or once every five years, always at the Birkie.”

BY MITCH MODE
Special to the Star Journal

The tracks at the American Birkebeiner had been set overnight and in the chill of early morning were pure and well-formed. It was cold, below zero and clear. The sun was low; shadows reached from woodlands across the snow of the unsullied race course. The tracks lined out straight and crisp and well defined, as were dreams of the skiers waiting. Everything was set; all stood still: the tracks and the snow and the skiers, their frosty breath rising to meet the sun.

Then the gun sounded and the first wave of skiers was off in a blur of movement and barely controlled chaos of sound and color.

I was in the first group, not by measure of past excellence but as a tribute to the group of skiers with the most Birkies completed, 40 or so skiers who have finished in the vicinity of 40 Birkies. We are given an all-red bib to commemorate the 35 skiers who, years ago, had skied the first American Birkebeiner.
The faster skiers lined up in groups behind us. They would go off in 10 minutes.

I skied out with the red-bibbed group, found a good track and started the long trek that, if all went well, would end on the snow-covered main street in Hayward, 55 kilometers away.
There were two skiers ahead of me. I let them go. It was early. There were miles to go. It would be a long day.

It was a beautiful day to ski. Fresh snow under a clear sky and rising sun. No wind. No sound save for the clap of ski to snow and the sound of my breathing. I skied on, looking for a rhythm: not too fast, not too slow.

I did not have it. I could not find it, the steady, efficient tempo of the distance skier. My mind wandered, my thoughts were scattered, my technique sloppy and undisciplined. To ski distance is a mental exercise as much as physical. On this day, on this 40th time on the Birkebeiner trail, I simply did not have it.

In an ultimate irony in a race that has 7,000 entrants, I was alone on the trail. I dawdled on my skis, stopped on the top of small hills for no other reason than to look at the landscape. Race mind? Race focus? Neither were there.

A skier passed me. I forced myself from my odd reverie and upped my tempo and skied behind him. I stayed there for more than 10 kilometers, letting him mark the pace. I did not have to think; I just let him lead.

The faster skiers came up on us, a group of seven, a few singles, then more and more, a steady stream, all very fit and fast. I watched them with a mix of detachment and awe. They were very good.

The clear, pure tracks wore down and became choppy and uneven as so often do the dreams and the goals and the best laid plans of skiers who come to the start line of the American Birkebeiner. By mid-race, the tracks on the uphills were soft and uneven and more difficult to ski in.

I kept tempo with the skier ahead of me as the kilometers ticked down. I skied at his pace. I did not focus. I just skied.

It was an odd place for me to be, that state of detachment from the race. It had been that way all week. Maybe it was the thought of doing it for 40 years. Four decades of toeing the line in the largest race in North America, a race of significant importance in my life. Maybe that was it, the enormity of considering that 40 years had passed and the weight of that all came down.

Maybe it was that in 40 years I’d seen skiers come and go, friends who skied with me, friends that I may see once a year or once every five years, always at the Birkie. Friends that have passed now or have slowed to a stop, burdened by infirmities of age and the inevitable breakdown of a body. Friends who I do not see now.

Or perhaps it was the knowledge that this day, the 24th of February, was the date my mother died. I skied the Birkie every year with thoughts of her in my mind. But this year, 40 years into it, on the anniversary of her death, maybe that pushed the race focus from my mind to consideration of things more important than a mere ski outing, for in the grand scheme of life a ski race is of marginal import.
At 29 kilometers to go, I passed the skier who I’d paced off. I was better focused now, better into the moments of racing. I never skied fast that day, but the kilometers passed. There were hills; it is not an easy course. But the time and the miles passed.

I skied onto the lake, less than 3 kilometers to go. The trail across the lake was marked by skiers, a steady ribbon of color and movement. Then off the lake, around a corner and onto a bridge that rose up into the February sky and spanned the roadway.

I skied up the bridge and for a moment I could see the street ahead, covered with snow, lined with spectators. I paused for a brief instant and took it all in: the bridge and the street ahead, the cheering crowd, the blue sky overhead.

There were tracks, clear and well defined and at the end of them, the finish. I leaned on the poles and pushed off, down the back side of the bridge and into the tracks and the tracks led to the finish line. The tracks were clear and seemed to glow as if from within and in that, they were as the dreams of the skiers.
I finished the race, my 40th, and stood still just past the finish line. I felt as if a weight had lifted.

A never-ending game of chase

 

We’ve had issues with rabbits, my dogs and I. We’ve had issues for as long as they’ve put four paws to the ground and followed their hunting dog noses on the sweet scent of game. Should my dogs have the ability to talk, (something that would not surprise me at times) they’d object to the word “issues.” I would guess “opportunities” would be their choice.

In truth, I am the one with the issues. I have issues with the dogs chasing rabbits pell mell in the woods, racing across the backyard in pursuit of cottontails, going full bore after every snowshoe hare and generally willing to bring death and destruction on any and all unfortunate rabbits they find.

When Riika and Thor were young and could run like wildfire ahead of a wind, they’d chase snowshoes hares during times of hunting grouse and woodcock. They’d bay a wild and crazed yelp and I’d stand there punching the button on the e-collar and they’d run through the shock it brought, so crazy were they for the hunt. In time they’d return, panting and long-tongued and full of burrs.

They’d lie at my feet, rest up a bit, then rise up to hunt.

They never caught one, for all their efforts.

Thor once found a nest of young cottontails. It was evening and the sun was sliding low across the lake, an omen, perhaps, for the young rabbits. Thor stumbled on them and they bolted every which way. He pounced on them, wild with their scent and their helplessness. We called him off. Fat chance that would happen. He wolfed them down like a fat man at a hot dog eating contest until we pulled him off the carnage in the tall grass.

I have no idea how many he ate. He seemed displeased that we would deprive him of more of the festivities and sulked all the way back to the truck.

On a dark morning in November, before the time I’d fully fenced the backyard, Riika and Thor broke their rope tie-outs and ran crazy through the neighborhood, hot on the trail of a resident rabbit. It was 5:30 a.m., and the neighborhood was dark and quiet. Until then. They yelped and barked and chased through yards and driveways after the phantom rabbit. And I, like a fool, followed in the dark, stumbling over curbs and lawn implements left abandoned in the dark.

All the time their crazy-dog barking rose into the chill air. A light turned on in one house. Another. I could not call for them and lord knows the whistle was useless in the quiet time before sunrise. I stalked like a burglar, half expected flashing lights to appear. Eventually Riika ran past, trailing 15 feet or so of broken rope, and I was able to grab the line and snap her to a stop.
Dogs and rabbits; issues and opportunities.

Our yard has long since been fenced tight to keep the dogs in. But there are gaps, small and seemingly inconsequential, too small to fit a dog. But not too small for a rabbit. So the rabbits still come into the yard. I wish they would not.

Three-thirty in the morning. Twenty below zero. Thor barks to go out; Fenway joins him. I sleep through it. Sally wakes, plods to the door, opens it and the dogs are out like spark of lightning. There is a rabbit in the yard. The rabbit is fast; Fenway faster.

I hear Sally call for help. I stumble up, pull on pants, lurch downstairs to the door. I see the dogs at the fence. Fenway has the rabbit. The rabbit is quite dead. Fenway is carrying it proudly as if a trophy. Sally tells of the death screams of the rabbit that pierced the sub-zero darkness.

I go out in slippers and take the rabbit from Fenway. He leaps at it and I hold the poor dead rabbit high and toss it over the fence to take care of in the morning. I realize that I am very cold.

I get the dogs inside and go back to bed. I do not sleep particularly well.

Now, weeks later, the dogs are restless in sleep as if in a dream world where rabbits run wild and the dogs, all three of them, give chase. In the backyard, in the dark of the January night, shadows shift, take form, become recognizable shape; cottontail. I watch from the kitchen window. The rabbit hops its cautious way into the yard, rises up to taste lilac stem; holds a pose as if for the camera. I am not close enough to see the bright eye, the twitching nose, the coiled tension of prey in a world of stress.

The dogs whine at the door. I turn on the outside light, rap the window, rattle the door, make noise. The rabbit runs and becomes blurred shadow in the dark. Only then do I open the door. Fenway hits the ground at full bore heading for the back fence; Thor and Riika follow, slowed by age. The scent of rabbit is heavy and fresh and all three dogs pick it up. Riika and Thor born and bred to hunt; they know no other way. Fenway, lord knows where a Boston terrier gets the hunt craziness but he has it deep and true.

The dogs course the back fence line, noses full of rabbit scent. But the rabbit, on this night, has found the gap in the fence that is big enough to squeeze through. The dogs follow the scent to the breach in the fence and stand, focused as tight as lasers in the night air.

The air holds scent. Then the breeze comes up and the tantalizing scent of cottontail rabbit rises into the cold air and is gone like a spirit. The dogs come to the door.

In a neighbor’s yard the rabbit rests uneasy. But safe.

For now.

January 4, 2018

Cold comes in as if on riding on the wings of a white owl; silent and pure and beautiful. But beneath the beauty, steel-like talons and piercing bite. Cold comes as if in the long glide of an owl in flight; dark sky, moon’s glow, ghostlike movement, then change sudden.

Dawn brings a rich blue sky but the beauty is deceptive; it’s 20 degrees below zero. Or more.

An hour after sunrise the sky color is a blend of pearl and washed out blue. Smoke rises straight. Trees stand as if shocked into stillness. It is very cold.

The first birds appear as if by magic. One minute the yard is clear; the next, movement. Small birds come as if materializing out of the cold air. Where have they been? They perch on whip-like branches, considering their next move. Then they move to the feeders, the chickadees and finches and doves and cardinals.

“It is sunny and the day is one of wonder and beauty.”

I look at the small birds as if beholding a miracle. The small ones, the chickadees and their like, would fit in the palm of my hand. If I were to hold one such it would seem to bring no more weight than a shadow or a snowflake. Yet they burn bright with energy after the night of the cold and in the time after dawning they come to the feeders. One cannot watch the small birds in the bitter cold without a feeling of wonder.

The birds crowd the feeder. It is still in the minus teens.

By early afternoon it has warmed (though in matters such as this “warmed” is deceptive), it has warmed to near zero. A few degrees above or below zero; it really does not matter.

One does not dress differently nor take added precautions for a measly couple degrees. I dress and gather an armful of skis and poles and leave the house.

A foursome of doves regard me from their perch on the side of the garage then take flight, lifting into the cold air, the sounds of their wings cutting the chill. I feel bad for them flying; it takes energy better hoarded for warmth and safety and I am no threat to them. They, of course, do not know this and rise into the air as they do when my dogs patrol the yard.

A thin wind sweeps the trailhead as I put the skis to snow. I think of the image of the white owl of the cold and the hard talons hidden beneath the beauty. It is sunny and the day is one of wonder and beauty. And of cold; cold that settles as a cloud, cold from which there is not true shelter to be found out-of-doors. Cold as harsh and unforgiving as a predator.

Then I begin to ski.

I ski with the knowledge that I will not fully warm up for at least 10 minutes. It will take that long to generate the heat to sustain me. I know my hands will chill and fingertips will ache and that I will hunker down into the high collar on my jacket. I know also that in time, 10 minutes, 15, I will find comfort. But I know also that if I go too long the heat will begin to fade and I will begin to feel the true cold and that I will, should I be out that long, find risk in the bitter cold.

I ski in that sweet spot between chill of starting out and chill of time too long spent, on this day an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Were it colder, ten below or more, an hour would be the maximum.

There is movement ahead; a deer. The deer crosses the ski trail and edges into the woods. I slow; regard the deer with interest. No horns. Young. Blocky in build, built to take the cold of Wisconsin. Then the deer is gone and I ski on alone.

It is a beautiful day of sun and shadow, of tall trees and a winding ski trail, of shadows of trees cross-hatching the white of snow. It is very quiet. The woods are at peace. I find the rhythm of cross country skiing, the kick and glide metronome of repetition and ultimately of relaxation. I am aware that I am chilled and then, later, aware that I have warmed and the chill is at bay.

I ski for an hour and a half and I am pleased with that, pleased in the sense that I have gotten out when the easy thing would have been to stay inside. When I was younger I would routinely ski at minus 10 or minus 15. Now it comes harder, that effort in the cold.

It is more difficult to find the motivation to leave the house. It is, thus, more satisfying when I do.

When I am done skiing, I load skis and poles and the back of the truck, take my gloves off and walk to the door. There are grouse high in the popple trees feeding on buds, puffed up against the bitter cold. Four of them and the high sun lights them and they seem to glow.

In late afternoon the shadows reach out and the temperature begins to slide. It will be another cold night. The cold has settled across the land and it is not going to leave soon.

It is part of it all, the deep cold, part of life in the north. We know only that the cold will come as if on the wings of a white owl, come and stay and reach us all and we will all deal with it as we will. It will come as the changing year will come, irreversibly and irrevocably.

December 22, 2017

The woods are a study in washes of grays, the austere landscape of December woodlands under cloudy sky over new snow.  It snowed the day prior, a soft, steady snowfall that accumulated through the dark hours of night and hazy morning.  December snow.  A White Christmas guaranteed.

They groomed the ski trail, an early Christmas gift.  The ski trail snaked through the woods as all good trails do, sinuous and smooth, up hills and down, none of the boring straight, flat sections better left to blacktop highways.  A good ski trail reflects the landscape, rising and turning and at the best resembling a small stream or a musical score.  The best trails have a rhythm to them, a smoothness and a flow. Skiing a good trail is like paddling a small stream or riding a winding road; these things are all connected.

A good trail spools out in front of you like a ribbon. You can look ahead and see the trail running ahead and then it turns a corner, out of sight. You ski into that corner thinking you know where it goes but never fully certain.  Around the corner, unseen, may be a surprise and you know what it is only when you round the corner and it rises up in front of you.  All trails can run easy for sections then rise into a choppy stretch that you do not expect and in that they are as our lives can be: Smooth and steady, then rough and rocky.

Ahead, a splash of color. Skiers, three of them, paused. Red jacket and yellow and blue; the colors of summer and autumn come to the spare time of winter.  I ski up to them and stop to visit.  I know them all, have known them for decades. One local, two out of the area.  Old skiers now, all of us.  We’ve been doing this all of our lives, this business of skiing.

We chat, skier talk of skis and waxes and time on snow, of weather and ski trails.  We talk of being fast skiers years ago and now being slow and how it does not matter. What matters now is the simple act of skiing and all that it brings.

We talk of the Birkebeiner; we all ski that event. We do a quick tally of how many we’ve skied; one skier at 20, two at 35, one at 39. Over 125 Birkies skied between us. The years add up.  Old skiers can run up a tally.

Then we ski on, the four of us, lined out; kick and glide, kick and glide, marking out the rhythm of skiers on a December afternoon on a trail that weaves and turns, lifts and drops, that has corners that hide surprises.

At a fork in the trail we go our separate ways.  I ski on alone and for some reason my mind goes to the Robert Frost poem of roads taken or not taken and on the day, on this trail, they have gone with one road, I another.

I ski slowly, working out the tempo as I go, telling myself I am skiing slow and steady because it is my first time out on snow but when I face the truth it is because I have one speed only today:  Slow and steady. There is no extra reserve to draw on.

The winter woods are quiet and restful.  I am alone on the trail now, the only sounds are ones I make, the only movements mine.  It is a busy season; Christmas draws near, New Years to follow. There is much to do.  There is a scramble of tasks, and days and nights fill with activity and bustle.  It is a hectic time.  There is no rhythm to the days, only a choppy, fragmented rush with too much to do and too little time.

But on the ski trail it all fades away into the winter landscape, the stark trees and the new snow and the heavy cloud above.  There is only the simple, pure task of moving forward on skis. There is only the snow and the sky and the skis and the winding trail.  In that time, all else fades away.

I think again of Robert Frost, odd in that I rarely read him, but I recall words of a snowy woods, and the woods being “…lovely, dark and deep…”  That is where I ski, through lovely woods on trails that are musical in their flow.

After a time I ski out of the woods into an open area. The trail forks.  To the left another loop of trail. To the right home to the bustle of holidays.  I pause.  Then I ski to the right, toward the truck, toward home, toward holidays and all they bring.

Just two old dogs and a hunter

I left the tree stand at 10 a.m. We weren’t seeing any deer; breakfast sounded like a better idea. I walked across the field and up the hill to the west. It was cold. At the top of the hill I stopped and looked to the skyline. The land was cold and barren; the horizon was hazy as if a holding a mystery to be unraveled. I was looking at the landscape but I was also looking at the change in the season. Autumn gone; winter ahead.

I stood for a moment then walked down the far side of the hill and into an area that 10 years ago was open field but now is growing over. I was looking for wild asparagus. I’d found two of them on this hunt. An irony, I knew, that in the waning days of the year in November’s chill I was looking for asparagus and in that, planning for spring.

 “They met my eyes, Riika and Thor, bright eyes still full of the joy of hunting.”

A grouse flushed; then another; more. Eight in all. I thought, “Well that’s interesting. More grouse than deer.”

Then I went the shack and cooked bacon and eggs.

A week later deer season was a memory. So were the grouse. But the grouse, that memory had possibilities. I loaded the two dogs in the truck and we went hunting, my old dogs and me. We were hunting for our own memories, of past hunts and past seasons and in the full knowledge that we may not pass that way again. Two old dogs; they can’t hunt forever. Nor can I. For to confront the reality and the mortality of aging dogs one, at a certain age, does the same for oneself. No dog can hunt forever; nor can any hunter.

On this day the dogs hunted well, watching me often, responding to hand signals which is all we have now; they are both deaf and the whistle does no good. But they hunted with heart and enthusiasm. What else can one ask?

We did not see grouse where they’d been. I circled closer to a swamp.

I never got the gun up on the first grouse; the stock caught on my coat as I tried to raise it to shoot. I straightened the folds of the coat. The dogs watched me. I took two steps and another bird flushed and I killed it as it flew left to right in front of me. The bird landed on the swamp ice and skidded thirty feet across until its momentum slowed and then stopped forever.

The dogs were on it, slipping on the ice, old dogs but still keen to hunt. I took the bird from Thor. They met my eyes, Riika and Thor, bright eyes still full of the joy of hunting.

I pocketed the bird on this day of early winter, on this day of old dogs and an old hunter and with memories of past hunts and memories made on this day both.

Hunting leaves time for questions, few answers

We walked to the stand under the beam from headlamps, the slivers of light inconsequential in the vastness of predawn dark.  It was heavy overcast after a night in the black of a new moon.  There was no smudge of dawning to the east, only the ocean of dark in the woods around us.  Above, the wind moved the trees and the sighing of branches in the breeze was a constant.  We walked slowly but deliberately.  We had time.

The air was heavy.  The ground was damp; leaves did not crunch underfoot.

To the north and east, distant, a shot, twenty minutes before the season opened.

“How can they see,” Ted asked.

“They can’t,” I told him. “Had to shoot over a light.”

Violators.

It was opening morning, a time of mystery and optimism, of questions and no answers. Say what you will, hunting, all hunting, has at the core of it questions seeking answers. There is no certainty.  There are possibilities; there are probabilities; there are options and plans well made.  But at its center hunting has no certainty.  At its most basic are questions looking for resolution.  In the day of the hunt the questions asked before the hunt are resolved, over time, in the field.   A hunt starts with questions.  The day, the hunt, brings answers, slowly, grudgingly, inevitably.

We did not know how the deer would move.  We did not know if they would move at all.  We had no way of knowing the unknowable, of discerning the vague and mysterious world found in the woods and field.  We did not know what was ahead. All questions.

The day started slowly. Darkness held sway beyond the time of opening.  The view from the tree stand was of dark and shadow, of indistinct shapes that only slowly took form and substance.  The overnight cloud cover held tight as if the night was holding back something secret from view.  Only slowly did the dark and shadow world come to definition in dim light under the gray November sky.

The landscape in what passes in early morning daylight is an austere palette; somber greens of pine, tawny grass and  rusted fern, russet oak leaf, undertaker grays of tree trunk and branch, umber and Sienna and watercolored blur.  It is a landscape at rest; the exhausting surge of greenery is gone to the dusty calendar pages.  The fireworks of fall color are memory now.  All that remains is the sere colors of late November.

The day is a slow starter as if it is still in slumber and awakes only reluctantly.  We hear sounds of distant rifle shots.  We wonder of them. We question them; did they end in success?  Failure? There is no resolution, questions only.

In the years we have hunted this stand we have seen deer early on the opening.  Today, none.  Today, no movement: no deer, no birds, no squirrels.  Nothing.  So we wonder, the two of us, of the why and the why nots of it all.  Questions.  No answers.  Not on this morning.  In front of us a twisted cherry tree stands, its branches turned and looped and resembling nothing more than a question mark.

Mid-morning a doe moves to our east, hidden in part by pine and oak scrub. But a doe; no question.  An hour later a small buck, a spike buck that had we not used binoculars would have passed for antler less.  The antlers were short and pointed, the size of your pinkie finger.  Perhaps not a spike as much as a spikette.  But nothing else.

I hunt until ten and then walk to the shack and make coffee, bacon and eggs.  Ted hunts til noon.  No deer.  We talk about the morning over coffee.  The wood stove brings heat.  Questions; no answers.  Then back to the hunt.

The afternoon unfolds as the morning had. All is quiet save for the sound of the wind. The temperature drops and we hunch deeper into the layers of clothing, all topped by the garish blaze orange.  We do not see deer.  We wonder why.  It’s been a bad acorn year.   These woods have oak that, if the crop is good, bring deer to feed. This year is a poor one.  Is that the reason we do not see deer?

We wait.  If you do not wait well you will not hunt well.

The doe comes first; a snap of branch broken, the beat of hoof to ground, then the doe at full run at a hundred and twenty five yards off, angling toward us on the edge of the field. Then Ted says, “Buck!” And in that instant I see him.

He is very big and he is running very fast chasing the doe.  He follows the doe, running at full bore, antlers high, covering ground.  I watch over Ted’s shoulder as the rifle comes up and tracks the buck.  It all happens fast; the doe, the buck, the rifle swinging in pace with the buck.

There comes a time when all the questions of the hunt come to this:  Take the shot?  Or not?  That is all.  That is the decisive instant of the hunt.  Shoot or not?  That is all.

The buck is in full out sprint, Ted’s rifle is marking him, the moment is now.  It is time.

The buck runs into the cover of woods and Ted pulls the rifle up.  The question is answered.  The shot is not taken.

The line was wrong; the buck angled toward us, the vitals hidden. The buck was running in full.  The point of it all, when you get to the heart of it is this:  Can I make a clean shot?  The point is not to hit the buck, the point is to make a single, killing shot. The shot, the one good shot, was not there.  The odds of hitting the buck were good. The chances to kill it clean were not.

That buck will be with us for a long time.  I have the memory as a photograph, the big body, the high rack, heavy and full that gleams as if ivory.  The buck in full.  The buck of dreams and of hopes and now, of memories.  Ted says, “That’s the biggest I’ve seen in years”.

The buck runs hard to the north.  We see him for an instant in a gap in the trees.  Then gone.  Silence.  The cool air of November comes down around us.  The leaves on the trees begin to wave in the breeze.

In our minds we imagine the buck running north, over the next ridge, down the far side, over oak leaf, past the gray trunks of silent trees that stand as sentinels to it all.

Then to the north, not far off, a shot.  It cracks the air.  The sound of the shot reaches out into the cloud and the gray sky and the November air.  The sound becomes echo but on the return there is no sound, only a final question.

The solitude of falling snow.

The gray sky was low and the breeze stiff and chill as I stood on the hillside. The forecast called for snow. The trees were bare; there would be no shelter from them today. I took it all in; the sky, the rising wind, the spare trees and skittering of fallen leaves, then started down the narrow path the led to the lake.

The fiberglass duck skiff slid into the water. I won it at a Ducks Unlimited dinner, lord knows how long ago. Thirty years? Forty? The fiberglass wears patches like scabs, bruises where the glass cracked and I laid fiberglass tape and resin as Band-Aids against leaks. It floats. It carries weight. It does the job.
I loaded a bag of decoys, the shotgun, a camouflaged bag of gear. In the bag was a camera, two boxes of shells, binoculars, a set of regulations. I have never in my life needed two boxes of shells, not on that lake, but two boxes fits the bag well and frames a gap for the camera so I carry them.

As I set the decoys, the wind gathered muscle and the boat drifted. Paddling back against the wind, I placed seven factory-made mallard decoys and an equal number of wood and cork frauds that I carved.

In a normal year I would pull the boat up on dry land and walk to the blind but this is not a normal year. The rains of last spring, when we had double the average rainfall, flooded the swamp and now the footing was uncertain. I did not walk to the blind but paddled the boat close and then pulled it into the flooded timber behind the blind.

I carried bag and cushion and shotgun to the blind and put the gear bag in front of me on a log that was above water level. Reaching into the right-hand pocket of the hunting jacket, I felt for three shells, loaded the shotgun and rested it atop the bag.

Then, for the first time since I’d left the hilltop, I relaxed.

The lake is not a good one for ducks. It is convenient to me and so I hunt it. No, on this day I was hunting solely to hunt in falling snow and driving wind. Ducks would be a bonus; the snow, forecast to start later, was why I was out.

For reasons unknown, I love to hunt in falling snow. I will sit in a duck blind as the snow falls and watch the mesmerizing bob and roll of the decoys on the late autumn wind. I hunker down in my deer stand in late November as the snow falls and the world seems to close in. I do this for hours in the grayness and wind.

Rarely do I see ducks on days of snowfall; and seldom see deer. My range of vision in falling snow is reduced and swaths of landscape disappear in the shroud of snow. For all I know deer may move and ducks may fly and I never see them. I do not hunt in the snow for the success it may bring. There are other reasons.

I hunt in falling snow because the world is small, more manageable in snow. The horizon is gone; the world draws in. On a crystal clear day you can see forever and in that expanse comes a dizzying abundance; sky and horizon and distant hills and ever present trees and leaf and lake and more. It can weary the mind. Gone, all, on days when snow comes down. In the haze of snow one can focus on matters close to hand. Snow days are restful to the mind.
A deer stand in falling snow is very quiet. There may be the sound of wind in trees or simply the sound of snow falling on the earth, which is to say, no sound at all. The far-off ridge disappears in the mask of snow as if the clouds above have fallen under their own weight to come to ground. Your eyes find shapes and forms, distinct for an instant then faded as the snow shifts and you are left not knowing, not with certainty, what it is that you have seen.

In snowfall comes mystery; landscape seems to shift; what is solid becomes indistinct; what has weight lifts up. There is no certainty, only mystery and imagination and in a world of certainty and fact-driven answers mystery becomes an odd but wonderful feeling. Snowfall carries mystery from the heavens to the ground.

And there is this: Part of what we seek when we leave pavement and home and turn to field and forest is solitude, simple solitude as big as the world, as private as your soul. Sit on a deer stand or in a duck blind in the falling snow and solitude is your companion.

On the day I hunted ducks the snow came. Light at first then thicker and steady and the horizon was hidden to haze, then gone. I pulled the hood up on my parka and burrowed my hands deeper into the pockets.

Darkness came early that afternoon; the falling snow robbed the day’s late light. If there were ducks on the wing they were lost to the snow and the cloud. I pulled the decoys, paddled back and unloaded the boat. Then I climbed the hill, started the truck and turned up the heater.

I did inventory; no ducks seen; no ducks taken. All I had was a solitary hunt in falling snow driving wind and in that, everything I needed.

October 27, 2017

When the golden leaves of October come to the ground they lie still and the season has changed, irrevocably.

BY MITCH MODE
Special to the Star Journal

Trees blazed as if afire with yellow flame.  Across the northland last week they burned bright; yellow against blue October sky, bright as star fire, gleaming, alive.  Gone now, most of the reds; faded, much of the green; blown to tatters the brown fern.  But the yellow leaves shimmered last week, stunning in their late October glory.

Yellow leaf along the forest trails was sharp bright as gold crystal in a miner’s pan; gleaming in the sun, treasure at arms length.  When the leaves fell to the ground, tossing on the autumn breeze, they floated as if gold flakes in the swirling stream.

Everywhere one looked last week there was yellow leaf of birch and popple and maple, alive with color and spark.

In the warmth of Thursday afternoon I took Riika to the hunt grounds, wandering the old road under the arching sky and yellow leaf.  We flushed one bird, a woodcock that rose to the thinning tree tops and then fell to the shot like a leaf falls to earth.  Riika mouthed the bird.  I let her hold it then I took it and slid it into the darkness of the game pocket on my vest.

We paused at the backwater of a narrow stream and Riika swam to cool down.  In the water was flotsam of yellow leaf under the rich blue sky and when Riika swam yellow leaves bobbed in the wake she made and then drifted silently away.

We hunted for less than an hour, plenty of time to hunt and not too long to harm the old dog.  Everywhere was the color of yellow leaf in the trees above and, increasingly, on the ground below.

Friday dawned clear and sunny and yellow leaf color filled the day, as a constellation spans the night sky.  Later that day they began to fall to earth, to drift down to gravity’s embrace.  What is it that makes a leaf break free?  What features the tie that bonds leaf to limb?  What is it that causes a tree to shed it’s golden cloak on a single day?

In the front yard the yellow maple was flush with richness of amber on Friday’s dawning.  Then, seemingly on a signal, the leaves began to fall.  In hours, an instant in a tree’s span, they were gone from above and lay in a soft, rich carpet on the ground.

On Sunday, most yellow leaves were fallen across the land, fallen from limb and branch and the ground below was drifted with leaf and duff.

Early snow will come, then go; it does not last. When it falls and covers lawns and woodlots one knows it will melt.  It comes and it goes and, when the time is right, falls and stays. Early spring days bring warmth and sweet scent after barren winter; but it does not last. Warm spring days tease, then retreat, then come again and, finally, are there for the long haul.

But a leaf once fallen never rises. When the golden leaves of October come to the ground they lie still and the season has changed, irrevocably. With leaf fall there is no turning back. A leaf and branch seemingly inseparable, held together as if a single element, when that changes all else changes. The leaf gives up its hold, the branch releases and for a moment or two the leaf drifts on the October breeze, riding the invisible current of air downward, always downward, until it lands without sound, soft as a snowflake, weightless as a passing shadow.

But in that soft tumble comes the stark impact of a season that has altered. For a fallen leaf remains fallen.  It never returns aloft.

On Tuesday the wind rose and howled the dirge of seasons change, a cold north wind that lashed the trees, stripped most remaining yellow leaf.  Branches stood bare and thin,

leaves tossed as if pages ripped from a calendar and blown with the wind, tumbling and rolling and drifting into nothingness.

The woodland goes to shadows of dark gray and brown and if you were to give name to the color of the somber hues of earth and bark you would name the color November Gray.  The days of the yellow leaf, so bright, so glorious, so fleeting, are gone.

I hunted ducks in the last hour of Tuesday.  I sat on an upturned bucket in low bog on a small lake.  I sat and I waited which is mostly what hunting is about.

Near sundown the sun bled through the scudding cloud and brought light to the west-facing hillside.  The trees stood resolute and unbending and unyielding, stood as if they have been disciplined or as if they are fatigued.  There was earth-tone green of pine; the russet brown of oak leaf; the reaching gray branches of limbs now barren of foliage.  The sun gave late warmth and glow to the hillside.

Above the tree line was the lowering layer of cloud moving fast from north to south.

Midway up the hillside from lake shore to sky line cloud one, no, two, trees stand out; they held yellow leaf.  Two days prior; dozens and dozens glowed yellow.  The two trees stood surrounded by the dulled tones of pine and oak and bare trees.  The sun touched them and it was if the trees themselves became the source of the light, seeming to glow from within; standing against the muted tones all around them and giving up soft light like stained glass windows in a church.

The north wind blew; the trees quivered as if alive; the clouds above raced southward on the wind as if they too were fleeing the northland.  Then the sun dropped below the tree line to the west and the yellow trees were lost to shadow and the gathering darkness, in the way that October and autumn warmth are lost to November, in the steady march and roll of the changing season as the yellow leaves fall.

Three hunts...

On the first day I go alone. I leave the dogs at home. In 15 years I’ve done this a handful of times, times when they were sick or lame. But it’s rare, rare that I hunt alone. This day I do. It’s been too hot; the dogs are too old; there are too many leaves. I go alone.

I walk in the heavy greenery on old roads that the dogs and I have hunted for years. I hunt as I did in times before I had dogs, moving slowly, pausing, waiting for the bird to take wing. It does not happen, the birds on wing. I do not see a single bird.

I think to myself, if my dogs were here we’d see birds. If Thor and Riika were here they’d work the thick shadows of mystery where the birds take refuge. I think, my dogs, they’d get their feet wet in the edges of marsh, in the coolness where the woodcock and grouse lie up under the September sun. If my dogs were here, we’d make birds.

But my dogs are not with me.

I walk a woodlot thick with balsam and popple and a woodcock takes to wobbly flight as if a leaf blows skyward by autumn wind. I am hopelessly off balance and I do not raise the gun.

My cell phone rings. It is my brother calling to wish me happy birthday. I lean the shotgun against a tree.

I think to myself, this is the modern hunter, connected to the world by invisible strands as if a spider in a web. Or, worse, as if a fly in the web. We catch up some, my brother and I. The sun has warmth on that September day; there is beauty in the woodlands.

We say our goodbyes and I work my way back to the truck. I do not see another bird.

And the hunt ends thusly: no birds, no shots, nothing but the wonder and splendor of autumn and in that, everything.

* * *

Two days later I take Thor. Thor of long legs, easy striding as a marathon runner, built for the distance. He is 13 1/2 years old and he is stone, cold deaf. I hunt him with caution, tending to him, fretting that he will get separated from me and not sight me and be lost and confused and scared. And knowing that when he is gone, when he is hidden by the curtain of brush and leaves that my heart will rise with concern and I will stand in the woods alone and, as he is, scared for not knowing.

On this day we hunt well. Thor keeps in sight. We flush two birds, but I see neither of them in the wall of green and yellow leaves that seems as if a mask on the woods.

I walk him to a place I know, a stand of birch trees that slopes up to a gentle fold in the land. I go there often with my dogs not because there are birds, but because it is a place of calm and tranquility and I feel better for being there. I never see birds in the place of the birch. I never feel a loss in that.

Thor sits in the sun with the birch trees’ chalky white trunks and their yellow leaves against the blue cathedral of sky. I lie prone in the grass with the camera and take his photo. In the photo Thor sits, head up and turned slightly as if he is seeing something behind the edge of the photo. He looks regal, handsome and powerful. It is only when you look close that you can see the white on his muzzle and around his eyes and know in that that he is aged. Look closer still and one can see the tarnished plating on the bell on his collar is abraded from the brush and the years and the miles.

We do not see another bird that day and the hunt ends thusly: my old dog and I, with my dog looking over the horizon as if he sees something that I cannot see with his golden eyes now clouded with age.

* * *

And then another day, another hunt: And Riika. Riika who three years ago was lame and achy after every hunt and in that November I said she would not hunt again. I said the same two years ago and I said it last year. Riika defies the odds. Riika, who has hunted with me for the past 15 years from when she was a six-month-old pup that would run wild with joy and run crazy with her hunter’s heart, run to the horizon and, eventually, back. Riika, who at six months could outhunt older dogs and who never, ever, quit.

She and I hunt. She is slow; she is overweight; and she too is stone deaf. We manage. Riika keeps track of me, keeps in eye contact. We hunt, my old girl and I. We walk the old trails that we have walked for over a decade now. In the early days they were prime country, chock-full of grouse and woodcock. It’s changed. All things change. Now the woods are past their prime, grown older and heavier and the grouse and woodcock are thin. We walk nonetheless, the two of us comfortable with the familiarity.

At an intersection of two trails, Riika goes ahead and turns down the old trail that we have always turned on. She remembers, year to year, where to go. She walks down the trail, then turns to make certain I am following. Then we hunt together.

We do not flush a bird. We hunt for less than an hour. And the hunt ends thusly: Two of us, walking into the memories of hunts past, with the Harvest Moon on the rise, doing what it is that we are meant to do. It is a very good hunt.

Early autumn ritual provides solitude, beauty and sometimes, ducks

The geese came in at sundown. A distant ker-honking; then closer, louder, imminent, as if an approaching storm on rising wind. Then geese in the sky, dark silhouettes moving purposefully. Everywhere the sound of their calls.

The sky showed rose at the horizon and the geese flew toward the sunset then banked, set wings as if an origami sculpture and gave up flight to gravity. As they lowered we lost sight of them; dark birds against the ink-black tree line. All that remained was goose call and dusky sky.

Then we could hear the sound of them as they landed on the water in the darkness.
More flocks came in; dozens at a time and then more and I said, “There must be over a hundred on the lake.”

Then the color bleached from the sky to the west and it was dark and it was quiet except for the sound of goose chatter.

We cooked burgers over charcoal and ate them with a side of heirloom tomatoes sliced thin, topped with mozzarella cheese and drizzled with oil and balsamic vinegar. Lingering heat from an 80-degree-plus day gave way grudgingly and we had the windows to the hunt shack open full. We ate dinner with a balmy breeze and the sound of geese in the night.

Sally left for home; I stayed for the night.

Out on the deck I listened to the geese that warm September night. There was the occasional sound, distant, of cars on highway. Other than that, silence, save for the geese. Silence and darkness and stars overhead.

I sat in the dusty old arm chair and read stories of long-ago hunts. The air in the shack was musty as if an attic or a basement. Air as that has substance as if weighted with memories and age and times now past.

After reading for an hour, I stood and walked to the deck. It was very dark and very still. Then in the blackness across the lake a crazy, wild sound rose as if a spirit: coyotes yipping and yelping and howling in the night. The geese went silent. The coyotes carried on, loud and spirited and alive with wildness. Then quiet. In the dark and silence I went back inside and turned off the lights.

It was warm the next morning in the dark hour before the dawn. I pushed the duck skiff out, paddled down the lake, tossed a dozen decoys, then paddled back to the blind. I sat in the calm of dawning, loaded the shotgun and waited. Most of hunting is waiting. You’d better be good with it.

The geese flew from the lake after sunrise; there had to be near 200. I hunted an hour and a half. I saw a couple dozen mallards, half that many wood ducks. I killed one duck, missed another. Then I packed up drove back to town and went to work.

Two nights later I was back again in the dark of night under a cloudy sky and steady wind. The temperature had dropped in late afternoon. There was the sound of wind in the tall trees, of leaves on leaves, branches on branches and sounds that had no discernible source and served to add mystery in the night. There was an occasional sound of goose, nervous ker-honks as if there was uneasiness in the birds. The coyotes did not sing that night.

The shack was still warm; I did not need a fire in the stove. I’d taken the blankets home and washed them and hung them to dry two days earlier and now I pulled them over me and smelled the freshness of air-dried laundry. Then I fell asleep and did not wake up until 5:30 a.m.

The wind was gusty. I made coffee and dressed. I set decoys in a different place, where I did not have a blind and so I knelt in the wet bog behind a screen of brush. I waited.

I killed a mallard at first light and at the sound of the shot the geese rose in startled flight and the sound of their wings and their calls carried across the lake. They lifted up, off the lake and above the trees and turned to ride the wind away from the lake. There were about 50 this morning. I wondered of the others, the ones from two days ago. Had they left the area and moved south?

There were fewer ducks on this day. I was okay with that. Sometimes I feel that there is too much keeping of score in our world today, of tallying up, in the field, birds seen and birds bagged. Years ago, maybe that was important to me. No more. Now I’d rather sit and take what I can and if that is an empty game bag at the end of the hunt, it is not a measure of failure.

I watched geese in flight that day, high over the trees, skeins of them, all high and all heading south. The season was changing. The geese were moving. I killed one more duck and then called it a day. It was 9 a.m. in late September. I had had a very good morning.

I lay the ducks on the sidewalk at home and the dogs came to inspect them, breathing in the rich scent. Riika picked one up and turned to me, life sparking in her aging eyes. I told her that some day we would hunt again.

The dogs, they don’t care if I get one duck or a dozen or none at all. For them all that matters is the hunt. It is part of their heart and soul. It quickens their heart. Perhaps that is what we, the dogs and I, share as much as anything.

I hung the ducks. Then the dogs and I went inside. We would hunt together another day.