7:10 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 25 degrees, wind NW
1 mph. Sky: mostly off-white and light, spitting snow, small-flaked
flurries. Overnight, an inch of snow softens rough edges, outlines trees, a
blissful and transitory enrichment, a velvet landscape, more engaging than
an ice storm. Permanent streams: under wraps, sight-tight. Maybe airtight.
Who knows? Aqueous sighing under a mantle of ice and snow. I need a
stethoscope to be sure. Wetlands: a fairyland of glazed reeds and sober
evergreens. Pileated drumming and calling, again. No one answers this
morning. Pond: tracks transformed to pockmarks. A green bench on the white
surface straddles the plowed loop—a seat for a young hockey player to lace
up skates, an obstacle for the deer to jump over, a bridge for the otter to
slide under, a tabletop for ravens to play cribbage on.

Just north of the driveway, raven in a red oak croaks, a salutation to the
shy sun. Three quick notes, hollow as an echo, repeated after a short pause
. . . again and again. Escorts me downhill. Fades away like yesterday's
news.

Turkeys, up early, lay long lines of tracks (none head to the feeders).
Female pileated absent from roadside maple—snow on the rim of the cavity
and no fresh chips. The whining wings of doves, six flush from the
driveway, a choreographed exodus. Small heads, long tails, easily
disturbed, fly like angles. A huntable commodity in Texas. A cherished,
protected bird in Vermont. In the spring of 1972, south of El Paso, in a
biological research station in a desolate corner of the Chihuahuan Desert,
outside Kermit, a town so remote and dry water had to be trucked in twice a
week, I ate doves every night for ten days. A fit-in-your-hand chicken.
While I collected pocket mice and kangaroo rats for a research project, my
major professor collected doves for dinner, which were everywhere by the
thousands: surprise, surprise . . . a dove tastes like chicken.

In and around the alders, adjacent to the marsh, two
red-breasted nuthatches toot. Chickadee calls, a truncated chorus—*dee, dee*.
Like forcing pussy willows in a vase, I whistle the chickadee's song, two
notes, the second an octave lower than the first, encouraging, hoping
spring blooms in his syrinx. We trade renditions. Chickadee ignores me,
continues the *dee, dee* . . . spring will arrive when it's ready.