Joan and I spent the day up to camp yesterday. We had to park at the end of the town road and hike in because there was still too much snow to drive all the way in - still too deep on the little seasonal dirt road that leads to Holly Lake and our cabin.
It was a beautiful day - another beautiful day (it's been nearly a week of sunshine and warm temperatures) - and yet, the deep snow pack of the mountain elevations meant that the snow would still live on for another week...or two. Even though the temperature reached up into the seventies (Fahrenheit), the snow refused to give up her grip upon the lands that live in the shade, which in the forest...is the majority of the lands.
As our day came to an end, with dusk falling and a full moon rising, we ended our journey back at our car - putting away the back pack...
And yet, as I opened my door...Joan asked for my attention...
Off to our right, a yearling walked wearily from the woods and right in front of us - no more than twenty-five or thirty feet away...
While the young deer was a bit scrawny, she was not skin and bones - she'd made it through one of the harsher winters we've had in the last ten years - especially during the months of February and March...so much snow fell - yet, only in the mountains. Down in the valleys, we mainly got rain - yet, it always fell as snow up in the Adirondacks.
Always wanting to be the Dr. Doolittle, I walked towards the yearling and while she watched me, she did not run...and I talked to her in a soft language she's never heard. And then a beaver crashed down his tail onto the pond's surface, just down the road and the yearling flinched - the beaver warns all his neighbors of danger, whether it's real or not.
And the deer took heed and walked off over an embankment and out of sight...a trance-like walk - a walk I will never understand, as another cold night was approaching to replace what had been perhaps the warmest day of the new season...back she walked to a place I will never know or understand.
Winter's Scar
I cannot understand...but I try
As I watch yesterday's struggle to survive...today.
It's not the struggle - the actual suffering, I see,
No, it's the scar that was left behind.
I can see it in her eyes,
And I can see it in the way she walks,
I can see it in her lack of reaction to me
As she walks...as she's walked for too many months...
Winter hung on a bit too long this year,
Especially here in the mountains,
Where the rain of the valleys below, fell as snow...
Where walking and finding food became so very hard...
And yet...this yearling somehow endured and survived,
and now wears a blank weariness as her badge...
I revel in her life - the test I would not survive,
And so it goes, way up high within the Adirondack snow globe...
