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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

EDITORIAL: THE RURAL LIFE
February Traces
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: February 2, 2009
Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two  
after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry  
roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have  
left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. All  
the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when  
the snow is not yet public, when it has only been tracked by an animal  
or two out on the ice and in the fields

I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as  
if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the  
creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human  
conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there is no going so hard that  
one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess what was gathered in  
the meander of a “foxprint” along the river ice. The fox knows, and  
that’s enough.

I don’t know why the sight of fresh tracks in the snow elates me.  
Perhaps it’s just the reminder that, minus the human footprint, this  
is still a world of animal trails. Over the fields, the hawks are  
laboring in an absence of updrafts. Is that how the year divides for  
them? A season of thermals rising over the dark earth, and a season  
when the snow seems to capture the wind and hold it down? Out on the  
lake-ice, the anglers are sitting on upturned buckets, the bold ones  
having snowmobiled to their holes. And yet they tested the ice with no  
more sophistication than the deer I saw walking across Piney Creek in  
Wyoming a week ago. You ease out onto the surface and see what gives.

I’ve grown used to the sullen light at last, and I find myself hoping  
for another storm, another chapter in a private winter. But the south- 
facing slopes are starting to melt quickly, and the skunks are almost  
certainly starting to think about breeding. Soon the male skunks will  
be out on the roads, and February will have come in earnest.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/opinion/03tue4.html

Gene GeRue
www.RURALIZE.com