Life In The Winter Woods  

                                                            It was -26 as I step out the back door. On the other hand, the sun is shining brilliantly and the wind that had driven the "feels-like" temperatures of the past day or so down into the -30's has abated.  

        Sasha is waiting impatiently as I fiddle around with snowshoes, toque, gloves and the other paraphernalia that I would be wanting on our morning tramp. Finally I unsnap her from her line, grab the ski pole that I usually take with me and set out across the backyard toward my packed snowshoe trail. She makes one last great bound into the air to celebrate the morning and the promise of another adventure together, races around the side of the house in hopes of catching the squirrel that alternates between tormenting her when she is chained up and helping itself to the bird feed, and then, realizing that I am on my way up the hill, tears after me, throwing up clouds of powder-fine snow in her wake.  

        There is some trace of wind whispering out of the northwest, enough for me to pause to pull my toque a little more tightly down over my ears and my jacket collar up to meet it. I feel the bite on my cheekbones and, for a minute, the throb of protesting sinuses before they adjust to the cold. Under my snowshoes, the snow creaks almost like old boards. The wind has driven it into a path so hard here where I had packed it previously that I hardly needed snowshoe - at least as long as I stay on the narrow footway.  

        By the time that I approach our Birch Grove at the top of the hill, I have already forgotten about the cold.It is an altogether gorgeous winter morning. Although the latest snowfall was not a heavy one, the last fingers of wind of the night before had draped it over all the spruces and firs in the grove. They stood now in silent contrast to the birches - green and white spires reaching toward a sky so intensely blue as to defy description. The sun, low in the southern sky even now at mid morning, sparkles off the branches of the birches and breaks into an infinite array of spectra as it filters through snow crystals that blanket the ground before me.  

        A fox had patrolled the previous night; rabbits had scurried here and there, leaving their tracks and occasional droppings as evidence of their passing; a moose had passed through within the previous couple of days. In the distance, a woodpecker hammers against a frozen branch, creating a staccato rhythm that identifies it as a Hairy woodpecker, even as the volume might suggest a much larger Pileated. I hear the nasal call of a nuthatch, and the answering "chickadeedeedee" of its fellow foragers as they flit through the branches of an old aspen, gleaning insects and bits of seed that are to be found on even such a cold morning as this.  

        Life in the winter woods, I realize again this morning, is an altogether more subdued affair than it is in the burgeoning days of May. There is no extravagance of growth and the only exuberance in sight is that of that great large puppy of mine as she tears off after a wisp of falling snow here, dives under a fir there in hopes of catching a careless mouse. chases after the long-departed fox, or insects the old cedar where she had found once again cornered an old porcupine on our walk yesterday. I am contend to walk, to look, to listen - and to breath in the silence and the subtle, spectacular beauty of this morning in winter