7:17 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday), 14 degrees, wind ENE
1 mph. Sky: thin cloud ceiling cracked open, pastel blues and gray-pink,
low humidity unveils Mount Ascutney. Room for the sun to break through, at
least in the morning. Permanent streams: ice reappears in wide, shallow,
slow-moving sections. Elsewhere, churning water holds ice at bay. Wetlands:
cold sink with frost. Spruce and hemlock shed some tracings of snow. Pond:
quiet sameness.

Short-tailed weasel: delicate five-toed prints, silent footfalls on soft
snow. Paired tracks, short leaps, springlike, out of the woods, across the
road, into the alders. Headed toward the marsh, the upper stream as a
guide. Maybe to hunt voles in subnivian tunnels. Needs plenty of food.
High-strung, perpetual motion. A hummingbird of a mammal. Heartbeat: four
hundred times per minute. A long, thin body sheds heat. Surface area to
mass ratio *very* high. Curls in a disc to stay warm. Eats (almost
constantly) to produce it. Stores hapless rodents in burrows and cavities.
Lines temporary den with victim's fur. Always on the move, a small,
itinerant hunter, itself vulnerable. Particularly to an owl.

One winter morning in the mid-nineties, a long-tailed weasel
chiseled frozen venison off a deer carcass I had position by my studio
door. While I watched, a barred owl, wings up, feet extended, talons
spread, swooped down, as though on a pendulum. Grabbed weasel by the
shoulders, talons in the chassis, and then looped back up—the fluidity of
an owl. No pause. Weasel dangled, an airlift of vital resources. A
pestering raven divebombed to no avail. Then, the owl entered into an
urgency of pine, dark and somber. Where one predator ate another.

Raven foiled, stuck with venison.

Crow over the pond, two ravens over the marsh. Both calling. White-breasted
nuthatch, sounding like a muffled pileated, calls from maples. Red-breasted
from pines. Both visit the suet cage until dislodged by a hairy woodpecker.
Chickadees and jays busy and noisy.

Quietly tapping, pileated takes apart roadside maple. A semi-circle of
woodchips, some six inches long, litters the snow. Flushes over the
driveway, a roller-coaster flight, black and white wings flashing. Lands on
the trunk of much skinnier maple. Hops higher. Hops and hops. Reaches the
top and then launches to another hardwood closer to the house, the tree I
saw him on yesterday. Red crest erect, a beacon of color in dim woods. A
second pileated calls, a loud nuthatch of a call, a derisive laugh hurled
in the face of January.