7:16 a.m. (sunrise a minute earlier than yesterday, two minutes earlier
than Monday), another dusting. 19 degrees, wind S 0 mph. Sky: opening in
the east, silver clouds embossed on morning blue—a rumor of pink. For the
moment, a bright and hopeful Inauguration Day. I'm thankful for both.
Permanent streams: level stretches sealed and silent; sloped stretches, a
composite of ice, snow, and gushing (not plunging) water. Brown creeper
whispers in ash, barely audible above the purl. Wetlands: across the marsh,
dark wall of evergreens—hemlock, red spruce, fir, white and red
pine—trimmed in snow. Shrew trail zigzags back and forth, woods to the
marsh. Face as a plow, legs too short to either jump or hop, like dragging
a thumb through the snow, inside shrew-trench, itsy, bitsy footprints.

Yesterday late afternoon: short-tailed shrew mid-road, confused. Ran from
one side to the other—insectivore indecision. I parked, got out of the car,
and watched baffled mammal, twilight-gray, moving like animation from a
Nintendo game. Stop and go. Stop and go. Eats every three or four
hours—heartbeat: eight hundred to a thousand times per minute. In
comparison, a weasel's a couch potato. Eventually, disappears into
a subnivian tunnel on the marsh side of the road.

In the gloaming yesterday, coyotes hurl their voices at the crescent moon.
First serenade I've heard in months.

Female pileated in the roadside maple, quietly chipping away. Flushes when
I pass. But on my way home, she's back at work, deep inside the tree. I
hear tapping, see sprays of woodchips, the bird herself remains hidden,
cocooned in wood. Woodpecker twenty feet up. Dogs and me, twenty feet away.
She looks out. Flicks chips. Softly hammers. More chips. I think I see her
tongue, an ant-seeking, a flesh-colored flash out the tip of her beak,
unspooling . . . or reeling. Hard to tell the direction.

I watch until my neck aches. A bright, beautiful morning . . . full of hope.