Last Hike Before Gun Deer Season

The coy deer, like a misplaced lawn ornament, stands on the trail at the top of a hill, its neck bent to graze on clover that doesn’t exist because I have obliterated anything green by walking this path every weekend. Directly above the deer, in a stand so empty for most of the year I have hardly noticed it, waits a man in camouflage, his neck-warmer covering his mouth like a thief’s. His big black bow looms out before him like some sort of insect antennae. I am startled to have come across another human being in these woods. For some reason—because I don’t want to ruin his hunt or because he looks so official—I don’t say anything, just salute. Then with a whistle, I urge on my confused dog.

In a mile, I spot a doe at the tree-line. Either the dog does not catch her scent or she’s still puzzling over the last deer, which didn’t give chase when she sniffed its knee. This deer turns, her neck bent like a swan’s, and watches us saunter by. A half mile more and we both hear something in the corn, a pounding of hooves on the packed mud. A buck runs out perpendicular to the rows, crosses the trail in front of us and heads for an adjacent field. The dog follows, yelping like a coyote, and is gone for a while. In another quarter mile I see four does. Then six turkeys. An owl. At the end of the trail I turn to begin the walk back. The coy deer hasn’t moved; neither has the hunter.

“See anything?” I ask, the one phrase I know to say to these strange men I encounter during certain seasons in the forest. He lowers the neck warmer. He is much younger than I thought.

“Not really,” he confides.

I tell him about the buck.

“Was it a big one?” He asks.

I want to say yes, but I don’t know the right lingo, can’t zero in on points or estimate pounds.

“I couldn’t really tell,” I say. He nods. I like him much better after we talk.

It is getting dark when I near the trailhead. But light from the open road allows me to notice one last thing: something on the forest floor that doesn’t seem to belong, something I must have stepped right over when I began my walk. Deciduous, like the leaves I find them in, antler sheds--white and rodent-gnawed—reveal themselves to me every other year or so, a little late-winter gift. But this is far too early to be a shed.

When I pick the antler up, I find it’s missing the cauliflower-like burr at the end, the part that disjoins from the pedicel on the deer’s head when the antler is naturally dropped. Instead, this antler is fractured. The inside glistens like quartz, smoky in one part, rose in another. I fantasize that these colors are from blood vessels that recently fed the growing bone. It’s tough to believe this solid thing grew, that less than a year ago it didn’t exist. I try to imagine the rut that broke it off: a smart, firm hit. I exhale, and a few short, bristled hairs on the antler’s surface embark into the air and disappear—like the deer from the hunter for the next ten days, and the hunter from the woods for the rest of the year.

Spotted

I zoomed above him, my wheels from his perspective like two dark galaxies spiraling by. I could see, through my windshield and then my rearview mirror, how he moved like a hieroglyph, like a drawing in a child's flipbook, this dark thing crossing the road. His body turned first one way and then the other, feet either forward or back, never in between, limbs all at right angles. I turned the car around and parked on the opposite side.

I recognized him instantly--the chunky, grooved middle, bulbous eyes, a dark slate color that to me has always looked purple: a Spotted Salamander. He lacked the two rows of large yellow spots down his back, a sign that he was new to the world--the waterless world that is--a metamorph less than seven days out of his pond, migrating to some mammal burrow in the forest where he would spend the next two years, coming out only nocturnally to feed on invertebrates in the soil. I felt lucky for this encounter.

He may never be "spotted" again, living a solitary life until one April night when the temperature remains above sixty-five in spite of a persistent rain. The warmth and moisture will draw him out of hiding, and there in the air a scent will guide him--a scent like mother's milk, the smell of her neck where you and I hid, as infants, our faces from strangers and then fell asleep. For him the smell will likely be of the algae that his mother passed into the jelly sacs of his egg, which bloomed in his own cells and has there remained, a plant living inside of an animal. It will be the smell of the first water, which, lungless, he moved through his gills and his skin to breathe. It will be the smell of the pond where I sit waiting for his once-a-year appearance. He will follow himself to himself.

Faith

I have loved forests all my life. Last week I fell for the desert.

The Utah desert, to be more exact: the most beautiful place on earth, according to Edward Abbey.

I didn't fall for its slickrock, that old paradox: sandstone expanses that grip the tread on your shoes as if the rock and your shoes evolved together. Hardly slick, you can walk up or down a near vertical wall of it.

I didn't fall for the sky, blue as the eyes of two of my hiking mates. Blue as the water that is mostly lacking there. Blue as juniper berries.

I didn't fall for the plants, tough and sweet-scented.

I didn't fall for the wildlife--lizards perched on the cairns that marked my path as if the piled rocks pointing me in some preordained direction were their castles.

I didn't fall for the oven-like air between the canyon walls, the insistent sun.

I fell for the echo. Greetings, names, declarations, snippets of song, sneezes--yes, anything you can imagine we yelled to the canyons. And always, there came an answer. In the desert, I had faith: There was someone I could not see calling back to me. In the desert, I believed.

Indian Pipe

Indian Pipe is up. In clusters it punches through the soil, at first glimpse the pallid knuckles of a bony fist. Yet fully emerged the plant is described as fleshy--fleshy as a mushroom, I think. Appearing fungal, Indian Pipe is a wildflower devoid of chlorophyll, with only vestigial leaves along the stem that look like a newborn's translucent peeling skin. It is more colorless-if one can say that--than a cave cricket.

The stem and leaves, the sepals, petals, and stamens of its single nodding flower: all have the same ghostly look. If the fog that rises from a snowy farm-field on a humid, cool midwestern morning took on a bodily form, this would be it. Pick Indian Pipe, also known as Corpse-Plant, and it turns black. It is the kind of flower Morticia, from The Adams Family, might rear, though transplanting is difficult due to the plant's parasitic relationship with a tree-root fungus--its sole method of obtaining nutrients.

Rarely, Indian Pipe's stem will be run through with a pale pink like the blood that shows beneath your fingernails when you clutch something. One wonders what might have been said, here in the darkest part of the forest, to make this icy flower blush like this.

Pickin' Crabs

The Atlantic Blue Crab is red after steaming, changing color like human blood when out of its element: blue under the skin but red in the air, loosed from its ocean of veins.

"Touch its eye," my niece says, and I do. The eye is hard and ovular, at the end of a short stalk. Everything about the crab is hard. I puncture my thumb on one of its "teeth," a succession of small triangular protrusions along its carapace, like the jagged edge of an ironwood leaf.

I twist off the walking and swimming legs at the first joint, flip the crab over, and place a knife-edge under the apron, a small hinge connecting the upper and lower shells that can be used to determine a crab's sex. If shaped like the Washington Monument, one website says, the crab is a male; if the apron looks like the capital building, it's a female.

My mother leans across the table and says, "There it is, Jill: the devil." Also known as the dead man's fingers, the crab's gills--a series of white and black, minnow-sized, bellows-like organs--taste bad and shouldn't be eaten. The warning given each year when we were little at the annual crab feast: Eating the devil will kill you.

I clear out the gills, along with the mustard--a yellowish glob of what has been removed by the crab's digestive system--which, my sister says, she likes to eat. "Don't tell them what the mustard is," she whispers, referring to her children, "or they won't want to try it." My sister also likes the roe, or crab eggs, but today she has bought male crabs, which have more meat. Finally, I get to it.

The meat, that is. I break in half the lower shell of the crab, revealing multiple chambers. Inside each is a small lump of meat, like a tuft of milk-weed fluff before it has been separated by the wind. It is white, light, and slightly sweet.

I don't know why it is there--the meat--inside this hard-bodied thing. The meat certainly does not give the crab structure or girth. It would be foolish, wrong, dangerous, even, to think the meat was there just for me to eat. But before a crab feast, the table is wrapped like a gift in brown paper. And around it, for as long as it takes to pick the crabs--it can take a dozen crabs to yield a pound of meat--sits my family, laughing and talking.

Weeding

For three days, it rained. It rained even on the map of Wisconsin, the 3-D topographical one my husband bought that I left rolled on a table by an open window. I spread the map out on the carpet in the hall and flattened it with books. Each day in the morning, the dog and I went for a long walk. We spent the afternoons, the three of us—me, the dog, and the map—drying out.

And then it stopped. The dog, with her rump sticking high out of a mound of stones and chunks of old barn foundation piled at the back of our yard, focused on the premeditated murder of a chipmunk. My husband chain-sawed a maple limb that had come down. Completely hollow, the limb was the outer half of the one that holds our tire swing, which still hung, daring us to use it.

I went to work on the strawberries, which I had been picking, moist and not that sweet, in between downpours all week. I like picking them more, I think, than eating them. The kneeling search, the joy of finding one red all the way around with no mouse nibbles, the plucking and filling of bowls and baskets satiates something other than physical hunger. But tonight, I left the berries be. It was work-time. The patch needed tending.

I pulled up the white campion and lawn-grass that had invaded and rose above the canopy of this strawberry forest. And somewhere in the middle, the leaves I parted revealed a small nest, its cup three to four inches in diameter, made of the same grass clippings I mulch my garden with. Inside were five barely blue, brown-flecked eggs. The mother and father were nowhere around, but I have seen them—song sparrows—in the trees at the back of the yard.

When I come upon something like this—a nest of eggs, a turtle, two fox kits playing in a field that bark and separate when they see me—though I know it is happenstance, it makes me think of a silly analogy: it is like the first time one sees a friend in his or her pajamas, the first time that friend comes to your house, opens the refrigerator door without asking, and commences to eat. It is an indication of closeness, of shared space and resources, a treasured proximity.

For three days, it rained. Tonight the sky opened and turned blue. The garden needed weeding. I did too.

Friends

My friends are back. I do not call them such
with certainty: they do not welcome me,
or speak, even, anticipate my touch,
or think about me in their absent weeks.
Yet still, religiously, they do arrive--
their green suitcases stationed at my feet--
some nodding, all determined to survive
whatever weather they and I shall meet.
No matter how impassive they may be
I walk about and greet each one by name:
Hepatica, Bloodroot, Anemone . . .
Each year they look surprisingly the same.
They teach, though silent, nothing can transcend
the reassurance of a steadfast friend.

Flying

We begin to descend over Lake Michigan. The pilot has offered free TV. My seatmate watches Real Housewives of New Jersey but in the small screen flush with the seatback in front of me I have been tuned to the channel that shows our elevation and approximate location. We are now at 9,000 feet. I press my forehead against the window and look down at the wing, the lake.

I am immediately taken in. The plane begins to turn so that my gaze is nearly perpendicular to the water. A little sick, I keep looking. The lake has become impressionistic, like we are flying not over water but over the enlarged petal of a Lupine or Vinca. The tip of the wing looks deceptively close to the water. We continue to turn and the water slips into focus. I can see ripples, but the plane's direction and the opposing flow of the current have canceled out any sign of movement. Now it appears as if we are circling down onto the back of some exotic reptile, a skink perhaps, not just blue-tongued but blue-skinned, its cracked scales the color of water through a descending plane's window.

The scene blurs again. I must become an insect in a soda can hurled across a field, my brain a few simple nerves, in order to process what I see when I travel by plane: a reality show I just can't believe. Suddenly I would not care if we continued to circle down into that periwinkle haze. Like a bee approaching a flower, I am tuned to a single color and nothing else--no fear, no hope. Just aim.

Favorite Trail in Fair Weather

A man in snowshoes and fluorescent yellow vest asks me to "Hold up a minute." I pause on the trail. My dog, Betsy, stretches the leash to its end and sits; we are a planet and her moon halted in our hurtle through space. A barky German Sheppard also fluorescing-- in orange, with the words "Search Dog" on its jacket--crosses our path. He leaps toward a woman crouching in the woods, turns back, and barks once to the yellow-clad man, who then releases me, saying, "You're alright," as if I needed him to bid me entrance.

A few steps farther on, I unleash Betsy and she begins her familiar trajectory, revolving around me at ever-increasing distances as I move along. But we've separated too soon; suddenly I hear the voices of children. I call her back, feigning a treat in my closed fist, which works for once, and put her on the leash. I continue on; at the switchback we see two women and two toddlers, one carried, one pulled behind on a blue plastic toboggan. There are gruff "Hello's" as we pass.

Wary, I keep my pup restrained, and sure enough, at the top of the hill, after the turn, comes a tall, old woman.

"You must have seen . . . " she inquires, "a group of four?"

"Oh yes, " I respond. "They're up ahead." By this woman, I am almost taken in: her stature, white hair, knobby walking stick, big coat open at the neck; she might be mother nature herself.

But I must confess: I abhor a busy trail.

One more turn, and I take a stand. By the deep kettle where two summers ago Betsy met a skunk, where last summer she treed a raccoon, from the bottom of which, in a month, spring peepers will call, I let her go once and for all.

When I get to the stream, she has already leapt across, and I am pleased to see, in spite of the warm weather that has crowded my trail, the stream is for the first time this winter completely frozen over. Imprisoned by last week's subzero temperatures, on its short path from one lake to the next, the stream reminds me of recent cold winter walks when Betsy had to sit down every few steps to lick the ice from her paws, and we passed no one.

Turning to the left, I see a lone ice fisherman pulling his sled from the lake, and so we must press on. There is a downed branch another half mile into the woods, along a spur trail, just before the hole a family of foxes inhabited for a brief period not last May but two Mays ago. I like to sit on the downed branch. We will find solitude there, I know. Betsy leads the way.

I brush the four inches or so of fresh snow from the branch--so rotten I worry it will not hold my weight--and sit down to rest. There is something you hear in a forest when no one else is around; it comes to you like vibrations must come through the water to the lateral line on a fish. It dissolves you into whatever medium a forest is. When you rise, a layer has been sloughed off, and it is not so bad passing people on the way out as it was on the way in.

Change

"Dad has taken the girls to go sledding," my sister writes, and I smile. I think about our hill. To get there when it snowed we walked a carriage-road concealed by middle-aged, mostly white oaks; at the end on the left side was an old trash heap where we dug in summer with a stick for antique bottles. In layers of denim and cotton--no fancy winter clothes, just sweatpants over jeans--we spread out across that whole hill and sledded smoothly down.

Today, a "new" house (built twenty-five years ago), its winding driveway lined with evergreens, makes that impossible. And a neighbor's attempted orchard atop the hill seems to weigh it down. Is it typical to say, when I visit my parents and take a walk, that the hill no longer looks that tall?

It may be only that I have grown, my memory reshaping the land. But surely the land must shift, like one's own leanings, throughout a human life: soil loosened, slope reduced, or surface concealed by new roots.

Gravity

I walk on the surface of mostly month old snow, the trail packed so well by deer and other snowshoe-ers that I don't need to wear my own. The low angle of the January noon sun has created a taller forest on the ground than the one I walk through. I move along, eclipsing shrubs, trying to determine the hue of the shadows before me--charcoal or ash, the color of evening or morning.

When I get to the open field, absent of trees, I could be walking on some other planet's icy moon. Snow has drifted over the path, and with every other step my foot falls through.

I think of a friend in Kansas, awaiting a snowstorm, who has written me about her six-month-old: "Edison is in his Johnny Jumper and I propped up a box full of his toys next to him so he could dig them out and drop them on the floor."

"Glad to see he has discovered gravity," I will write back soon. Sometimes the world seems all push and pull: trees and toddlers growing up, me balanced on this temporary surface, but returning to the ground with every footfall. We learn to throw, jump, walk, but lest we forget where we belong, the sun presses us back to the earth in shadow.