Watched the sun come up over the
plain out my window. The day couldn’t be
any crisper, and clear and there’s virgin snow for miles around. My wife was worried. She showed me a photo she’d taken as we did
our changing of the guard routine. She
heads to bed at 4:00AM as I’m rising up. Hard to say who’s odder. Any rate she had a photo she’d taken of the
back yard, under the flood lights where the virgin snow had been despoiled by
tracks. Tracks that come right up the
house and then bounded off towards the cedar.
“What was this?” She asked,
genuinely concerned.
“No. That
was absolutely not made by a human nor anything humanoid. Sorry.
No.” And, no again. “So, what was it?” There were many other things we could
certainly confirm that this was not. It
couldn’t have been a dear. It looked
like it only had one leg and that it hopped.
Would that we were in Perth, but no, this was not a kangaroo,
certainly. A squirrel might hop that
way, through the snow, but it wouldn’t leave a print that deep. A raccoon, perhaps, though I haven’t really
seen one here. And what I was left with,
and what I told her, as she retired to oblivion was that it was some sort of
medium-sized marsupial. And het, deer move that way, when they are threatened.
Two days back, right before the snow, the front
yard was suddenly covered with cardinals scavenging through the remains of
acorns long nibbled on. It was, as I
told my stepdad, the ornithologist, almost if they knew it was going to
snow. He concurred that he’d seen the
same thing many times and that many birds have a sensitivity to changes in
atmospheric pressure. Surely,
evolutionarily speaking, any bird around here that couldn’t feel the change in
the weather was a whole lot less likely to survive when it did snow. After the ground is covered, there is little
of anything left to eat.
I took the bag of seed we have in the garage out
and threw handfuls of seeds out on to the porch and out into the front yard as
well?
Monday, 01/20/20
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