At the start of January, cold air slides along the Allegheny Front. Days are short, and the temperature hovers near zero in the valley, even colder on the mountain. Earlier this afternoon I called my 88-year-old mother and told her I was going for a walk up through the water gap, a place I hunt and fish, where I find the quiet and solace I take in wildness.
With worry in her voice, she asked why anyone would want to be out in such cold. My desires have always exasperated her. From the time I was a boy staying out late in the woods to see the stars come out or tramping mud into the house, excited to line my shelves with some bone or skull I’d found, she’d fuss and tell me I needed to be more careful. Today, before I hung up, she made me promise to “bundle up,” to be sure to tell Shelly where I’d be in case dark came on and she had to come find me. Thankfully, a mother’s love never ends.
As I set off into the woods, my snowshoes settle gently into the powder, like the tips of an owl’s wings as it snatches a mouse scurrying through subnivean tunnels. I think about my mother’s question as I make my way through the snow, my knees rising through drifts, breath steaming from my mouth.
What I love most about winter is the light. The way it leaks out low on the early evening horizon with a watercolor wash of purples and pinks, saturating the snow that has fallen the better part of the day. That, and the stillness. How when it’s truly cold a hush claims the air and sound travels great distances. From more than five miles away, I can still hear the engine’s horn as a train pulls coal cars through our village along the railroad that lines the valley. Because I’ve climbed the mountain today for the consolation I find in the lives of other animals, in my imagination the engine and those tracks and the threatening blackness of that coal become props in a model trainset, far-off and meaningless, at least for now, while I’m this deep in the woods.
During the coldest days, as animals hunker down in the shelter of dens and hollowed trees, the woods sometimes seem devoid of life. But tracks in the snow reveal the comings and goings of the wildlife that live here. Nuthatches and blue jays that feasted on beech nuts leave fuzzed shells littering the ground like emptied bags of chips abandoned by teenagers after a party.
The tracks of three coyotes separate into three distinct paths where they decided to split from the logging road to cover more ground, then rejoin the trail 100 yards later to form a single file that makes me think I missed a grand coyote parade. A trough through the snow indicates the washboard waddle of a porcupine that scuttled through, eventually ending at the base of a hemlock where it climbed to teethe a ring of bark that now brightens like a starched collar.
It’s in this paused space that I sense I’m not alone. I don’t mean the obvious knowledge that somewhere on the mountain a sow bear breathes beneath winter’s crust, preparing to give birth before the snow melts. Or that under the elegant architecture of the snow bridges that span the stream, brook trout fin slowly in water framed by ice.
When I say I sense I’m not alone, I mean I have the feeling of being grounded, firmly rooted as part of a larger whole, belonging to something more profound than solely myself. Community doesn’t matter just to human animals. The health of an ecosystem depends on how a community functions together: all its living parts.
While it’s true that we depend upon one another for survival, that sounds so dour, so pragmatic. I think it’s important to acknowledge we also depend on one another for joy. To answer my mother’s question, I suppose seeking – and finding – that joy is what sends me out the door and into the woods, regardless of the weather. For many of us who yearn for wildness, the longing to give oneself over to something larger, to experience and momentarily be part of another life, even if only by observing that life, delivers such astonishing joy that it borders on the magical.
A half mile behind the house where I grew up, there was a pond. Its water was dark and smelled of leaf-rot and pine needles. In winter, I pretended my boots were skates, as I swooshed and shimmied to the middle of the frozen tarn, where I’d rake away snow with my gloves and peer down through the ice. I imagined there was something below that might choose to reveal itself. Some mysterious face appearing in the blackened mirror to divulge a secret about the woods, letting me know where I might find a muskrat den or see a red-tailed hawk nest.
From those first woods I learned to listen, to observe and still myself, to be patient. If I could do those things, I discovered, the woods might share some of its secrets. That’s a lesson I’ve carried forward from childhood, one that helps me as I endeavor to understand better the place I live, as I have taken my own sons and my students into wild spaces to seek what is hidden by our ignorance or lack of experience.
Today, when I come across a pile of feathers and bones beneath an old white pine – remnants of a bobcat’s supper – I’m reminded that the lives that dwell here, if they’re to continue to survive and thrive, must eat and have space to hunt. Their prey needs space, too, to forage and propagate and raise the next generation. The trees and plants that feed this prey need space and time to grow and move through their cycles.
After a few hours wandering the mountain, following the snowy hieroglyphs made by pads and claws, I’ve sweated through my wool sweater and my legs are tired. The colored light that smudged the air when I set out has grayed, signaling that true dark is only minutes away. I know it is time to head back, although, as always, I regret having to leave.
On the periphery of my vision, as I shift toward home, I catch movement and turn my head slowly. Cloaked by a rhododendron branch whose green leaves curl inward to protect against the cold, a bobcat stares at me, framed by gnarled branches. The cat, which I assume is the same whose predatory work I admired earlier, takes a few steps forward and perches forefeet on a decaying log. A perfect profile from my vantage.
Here is the face I hoped would appear in the framed ice of my childhood pond, a woods secret revealed to me as my thoughts drift elsewhere. I’m already looking forward to telling my mother, describing how the air seemed to change, altered by this animal’s movements, its own desires as it hunted. Although I’m nearly 60 and have spent my adult life roaming this mountain, with each new encounter I’m stunned into surrender, recognizing how my life fits with other lives. Awe does that to a person, gifting a joy from the unexpected, a form of grace the woods bestow.
The cat’s nose and ears point to the sky. Fur a melt of blonds, browns, and steely gray. And the eyes yellow, like a lemon just beginning to darken. It seems that the wildcat’s gaze steals the day’s final moments of light before he springs through a hole in the undergrowth, vanishing, to leave his tracks, both in the snow and etched in my memory.