"Snow
While falling it hides your passage.
When finished it documents your path." ~Richard L. Ratliff
It is the heart of winter now. The cold is deep and intense, the fall of snow regular. Even the air around Fat Hummingbird Farm, with the exception of the wailing wind that comes with storms, is brightly quiet. Quiet such that when you walk past one of the Black Locust trees you can hear the crack and groan of freezing wood, the creak of a limb that may not last the winter. In the far oak, you can hear the woodpecker thud, thud, bash his insistent beak against the cold bark, hoping to catch grubs and bugs unaware in winter stupor.
These colder, leaner months bring night animals and their nocturnal doings closer to the house. They are hungry. They seek shelter. Also, the nights are longer so the world and time of the nocturnal beings has been extended and there are occasions when their protracted night-time activities and our lengthened hours of dark cross. A darker dark, an earlier dark. The world outside of our sealed windows, our locked doors, continues while we slumber.
Most mornings now, especially if there has been even a little snowfall, tracks can be seen around the house and up into the woods. Or there are traces of tracks that imply that the creatures had come for a visit, though we were remiss in greeting them. It is an odd bewitchment in that morning to see the trace of something that was there, that was awake, that sniffed your windows and scratched at your doors, that was close - so close, while you slept the night away. And leaving those tracks, those subtle fragments of what and who they are.
The tracks of our neighbour's feral barn cat are fairly obvious. The direction of where they come and where they go is predictable. His small, neat and tucked paw prints come from the barn and across our hay field. He comes across the bridge and then slinks around the entire perimeter of the house. He comes up and onto the porch where the bird feeders hang in hopes of finding a fallible bird asleep in a place too low. His tracks continue up the hill, down and across the stream, and back to his manure- and hay-warmed barn - in time for his early morning pan of steaming milk from the dawn-milked cows.
The other day when I went to fetch the mail, early in the morning and after a night-time snowfall I saw the tracks of a fox. She had come up from the old railway tracks, across our pasture, and into the dooryard. Her tracks presented a determined gait. She didn't seem to wander but trotted resolutely up the hill and back into the woods. She may already have had prey hanging from her jaws. Or she may have felt she was already late back to her den.
There are tracks of a very large-footed hare. It seems he must pause and look about a lot, then bounds in long, long vaults. His tracks always visit the lumber pile. It so happens that my large ceramic hare resides near that lumber pile. Bleached white, with tall ears, and a bemused expression - perhaps his wild counterpart is looking for companionship, or recognized in him another moon-gazing hare. Or simply wanted to share tea - as hares are wont to do.
"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take less," said the Hare, "it's very easy to take more than nothing."*
And there are sometimes tracks of deer. The deep divots their hooves leave are sedate and dainty and very carefully placed. Creeping reserved and reticent even under cover of darkness. There are other tracks, and brushings, and long drag-like mark's in the snow that must indicate a lower-bellied creature - a mink perhaps or a weasel.
Whatever the morning brings, with its signs and traces and auguries in the tracks of those callers, it is indisputable that a terrene 'becomes' while we hover insensible in deep sleep in ours. And that may be solace or it may be disquiet - to live with a world that just edges with ours. Where we are not the ones that leave the tracks.
* Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
