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.
