Part 14

I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or the month of February, but endless projection and development.

Not lost too long--because the cold deepens and bites in the late afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It feels like snow.

Need

Early next morning the snow begins to fall, thin and glassy, bringing in a new kind of quiet, unpredictable intent, spotting the thawed surface of the earth. After a few hours the flakes are heavier, and their momentum increases. They run down dizzily, with a ticking sound, shrouding the distance, pelting dead leaves, collecting in clumps between the needles of the pitch pines, coming down steadily and fast. The temperature drops quite suddenly, and the snow flakes grow lighter again. The wind sharpens, sending them ahead of it, lancing toward the south.

Hour after hour the snow collects with mesmerizing totality, and in the colder evening the wind drives in with great fury and drifts pile up. Dry snow whirls in and races around the windows, scouring them like a dust storm. The wind molds a long drift on the north side of the house, like flesh over bone, hip edge out and curving in, a woman’s shape, an inanimate body molded by violence into classic beauty, hollowed, not for love unless the wind is love, carved, marked down and conquered by everything that is latent and unconquered in the storm.

For many days afterward the arctic air reigns over us, and the snow is crusted, blindingly white in the sun, a mortal danger to animals whose food supply it covers. A long sickle, a new moon, of ice begins to appear along the rim of Cape Cod Bay. There is crackling, grinding cold, in a day when we rise a little past the sun instead of ahead of it. The freezing nights, for some of the animals that have endured the winter so far, must be interminable, except for the rabbit, caught suddenly in the open by a great-horned owl. I found what was left of it in the woods--a burst of little bits of fur in the snow; the owl’s tracks; a mold left by the rabbit’s body.

A hermit thrush dies of starvation, all its remnant food at winter’s end cut off by the snow. It is pathetically light, held in the hand, and when it is dissected only the tiniest patches of red meat show on either side of the breast bone.

I find a dead eider duck on the shore. It may have been blown against a tree in the storm. One wing is broken, and the feathers buffed and thin from beating. After its feeding grounds are frozen over in an inlet farther down the Cape, a great blue heron dies on the snow-covered shores, wounding its neck in the last throes.

The bird feeder is crowded with intermittent flocks of chickadees, juncos, and sparrows, all the ever present winter birds, pecking at seed, flying off, hopping on the snow, each with intense, nervous, active habits, keeping their wild, interrelated ways, entering in, displacing each other, disappearing and returning. A bolt of a bird suddenly tears in from nowhere and all the little ones are gone in a burst. A sharp-shinned hawk, a small hawk with an appetite for songbirds, has attacked in hunger and desperation, but it swerves when it reaches the feeder--its aim disturbed by fear as it approaches the house--and crashes into the window. It sits on the snow, terribly stunned, its head drooping. The body is the light umber of an immature bird, the breast streaked red. After a few minutes it stirs a little, wing shoulders twitching, head up, and yellow eyes glaring with the pure wild look of a hawk. Finally it lifts up quickly and beats away toward a line of trees in the distance.

The chickadees are soon back, jumping down to the feeder from an overhanging pitch pine and bouncing back up like small puffs of snow, having left danger behind with their usual vibrant but sturdy acceptance. They are businesslike, determined little birds. If I could only get inside that head behind the tiny black eyes, and follow. I could swear it has the quickest perception of things. In any case it acts as if there were no time for leisure. Its whole body is tripped constantly at a staccato rate. The head moves up, down, sideways, in the needs of sight and utility. It poises to hammer a seed held between its tiny black toes and claws. It rounds the branch of a pine, ready for the next find, wonderfully resourceful in the game of survival; with a serious intent, gay in action, employing every second with such thoroughness as to be completely careless of the outcome of life, and so perhaps to surpass it.

The mourning doves, whose low coos I mistook for an owl’s when I first heard them, are another of our permanent residents, not often at the bird feeder, but fairly ready visitors when they overcome their initial fear. One flies in, wings whistling wildly, hesitates, turns back, makes another foray, then waits in a shad tree thirty feet away, head bobbing, eyes blinking against the sharp sunlight. When a mourning dove flies up it shows a blue in its generally buff-colored feathers like a blue evening mist after winter rain. It walks with pigeonlike head bobbing back and forth, its thin tail standing out behind a tear-shaped body like the shaft of a cart, then spreading round and wide at the tip when the bird flies off.

While the sturdy chickadees carry on business as usual, the dove, in gentle alarm, waits for an hour or two before hunger drives it back to stay and feed; and not long after that another dove flies in to join it.

On the south side of the Cape where the open Atlantic surf keeps the shore waters fairly free of ice, there are sea ducks, eiders, baldpates, mergansers, blacks, or scoters, flying over the sea, or settling down on its shifting surfaces. Tiny white buffleheads, which make ducking dives into the water, show brilliantly against gray ice on the banks of an inlet at Monomoy. A tornado-shaped formation of red-backed sandpipers stands over the gun-metal sea. Patterns of wings and water run together, while the land is still not broken out of its frozen gravity.

For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more birds will die. Because this Temperate Zone, influenced by oceanic weather, attracts more land birds than otherwise might stay, there is a greater margin of arbitrary risk. The weaker individuals will die first, by a natural law, but all are subject to unusual violence. The comparatively mild coastal climate does not normally have a winter as bad as this one, although extreme conditions are no surprise in North America, and the risks vary for the lives exposed to them. One winter with exceptionally deep frost in the ground, hard winds, and little snow cover, is as dangerous to plants as a month of snow would be to the birds. And a mild winter may result in death or damage from belated storms and cold.

We talk of storms and the hazards of temperature as though nature were merely arbitrary, and inconvenience the essence of her plans. Being less self-sheltered, life subject to wild nature knows the extremes as standards of action. Living things are continually balanced between a bold summer and a demanding winter, where storms are the rule and risk is constant. They are unable to accept less. This terror has its pride.

Death, Man Made

Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention, abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder and pollution. In our power we are weak.

I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters, loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush, wielded at random.

Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood. When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive, out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying. Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown, are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a heavy coating of oil.

Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water. I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation, and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers. Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.

This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone. It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.

Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk, having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth a thousand ships.

“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise. Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.

March

Restless Days

Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32 degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions. Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.

The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon. Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of disaster.

“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice. High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness. Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the sands.