Last night was clear and I drove into the game lands above Tipton to where the reservoir sits halfway up the mountain. The sky opens there into a wide bowl, far from the artificial light we’ve drowned so much of the world in. When I was young, unless you lived in a city, the night sky was still dark enough to show you the wash of stars, the way they crowd every space, an impossible number, like trying to count the grains of sugar from a spilled bag on the kitchen floor. I like this time of year, especially when we have snow on the ground, because it reveals the lives that are always there, often moving in the dark of night, lives we seldom see.
After watching a few shooting stars and listening to the ice shift and pop on the reservoir’s surface, I went home and dreamed about walking in the woods with my sons and father; instead of men, my sons were boys, and my father very much alive again. The four of us followed the tracks of deer through hemlocks that outline the ridge, a place my older son and I tracked deer during muzzleloader season in early January. That day was full of crystals, an ice storm having coated everything in glass, and the tree limbs clacked as we slipped with each step.
I woke from the dream with a bit of melancholy that my boys are actually men now and my father a spray of ashes that have long since fertilized the wild blueberries on a south-facing slope not far from that grove of hemlocks on the ridge. But, any sadness that remained was swept aside when I looked out to see the endless blue, the sun pouring through the window to light the rooms of our house that had darkened through the long nights of December.
Here at the end of January, the sun has changed its position in the sky and the days are growing longer, reminding me that March along the Allegheny Front will bring the first coltsfoot blossom.
I came back to the game lands early this afternoon, walking in along one of the tributaries that runs down the mountain and into Tipton Run to feed the reservoir. I could no longer see the stars, but I knew they resided above my head, just as they had last night. And, of course, my sons and father weren’t with me, except in memory. This is a stream I walk in every season, most every week of the year. I tell my boys about what I see here when we FaceTime. We have names for different places in the stream – like the “swirl pool” or an eddy we call “king under the mountain” or a particular waterfall where the spray, on sunny days, creates a prism of colors.
About a quarter mile into the woods on the old logging road, I came across the large track of a coyote who sometime in the last 24 hours walked down the center of the path. Soon two other coyote tracks intersected the trail: smaller paws, suggesting that the larger track probably belonged to a mother and that these two others were her offspring. It was clear they were hunting, looking for anything that would stave off the cold, that would allow them to live into the spring of the year.
Her track never wavered as I climbed the mountain, while the smaller tracks looped out into the woods, often tracing the paths of deer, only to return to the mother, subserviently falling in behind her. I suspect in the coming month or two I’ll come across a winterkilled deer that these coyote chased and dined on.
I think about the two deer my son and I took this past hunting season, about the heart he and I ate the first night, its tenderness, the life that beat there and how it fed us. There had been a full moon that night as we dragged the deer out of the woods, so bright we turned off our headlamps and a luminescence coated everything, the backs of laurel and rhododendron leaves shining.
This afternoon, on my way out from following the coyote tracks, I found a large, flat rock near the stream, drenched in sunlight. The stone had warmed enough to melt much of the snow, and I sat listening to the water, closing my eyes and thanking the sun, the gift of this star that organizes our lives into seasons and years, the warmth it gives us, how it will bring forth the green world in the coming months, all kinds of tender green shoots bursting forth in March and April, feeding the hungry mouths who must walk these snowy woods for a few more weeks.
For the past two decades, Todd Davis has lived between the villages of Tipton and Bellwood at the foot of the Allegheny Front. He’s the author of six books of poetry, most recently Native Species, and teaches environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. Listen to the essay on the author's podcast.