Farewells

The chipmunks are awake. I think they may have gotten up yesterday as I saw the first of the year perched on a stone at my back door eating sunflower seeds. He certainly did not look the way I would expect after a winter of sleeping--he was fat and spry, not at all sluggish and skinny as someone who has been hibernating for four months.


The river is settling into herself and has quieted in the last week. While I think we're still two weeks from water levels dropping to normal, the shores and woods reclaim a little ground every day. That first day in April I am able to cross over the little creek adjoining the river and into the woods will be a happy one--after a month of no human activity in the area the soil is usually rife with an olfactory motherlode waiting to be gathered and sorted by Kola.


The kingfishers, who have been present but silent all winter, are announcing themselves again up and down the flooded banks. I wonder how easy the fishing is for them since I assume all the fish are low in the water, hugging the mud and gravel on the bottom. I also would like to know how the recently arrived herons are faring so early in their year of fishing--frogs are still ensconced in their blankets of mud, and with the fish still hiding in the depths, what are they eating? But the herons are there, doing their silent stalking--does this mean that there is someone to stalk, or just that they are rehearsing?


Earlier in the winter, on a rogue day of blessed 65 degree warmth, I found a heron lying on its side in two inches of water along the shoreline. His eyes, open and glassy, had either a spark of life left in them or had very recently given up sight forever. I couldn't tell which. His keel was bony and slack, a sure sign that the fishing had not been good. I moved him from the water hoping to spare his body from a serious roughing-up by the coyotes and buried him in the snow under a tree. Why I thought snow would protect him from coyote senses is beyond me, but for short time I did think that. I continued my walk, my thoughts never leaving the possibility of getting him home somehow to be photographed and later buried in the garden. While I knew that he might feed someone sorely in need of a meal, I couldn't stomach the thought of it. I was also more than a little intrigued by the possibility of photographs of those impossibly perfect feathers. Convinced,I circled back and dug him from the snow, stashing his ridiculous length in my sweatshirt and trying to look like I had anything but four feet of heron neatly folded into the fleece over my arm.
I am sure I had seen this very same bird the day before close to where I found him that morning. He was the only heron I had seen since late October, when the last of them lifted into the sky for a trip to somewhere warm for a few months. I thought at the time that it was strange that he was there, prowling the banks as if it were May and not January, and surmised that he must have been a first-year bird, brand-new at wearing his heron clothes and not yet versed in the ritual of migration. Whatever his situation, I hated finding that he had succumbed.
He resides for now in my freezer, waiting for the soil to yield to a spade. I don't know that I made the right choice in taking him with me and away from his home waters, but it's too late now. His spirit, already mingled with the many others lost this winter, does not care. Today, in the new warmth of early spring as I take the river's pulse for another day, I will surely find it there.