Silence - Winter Walk

Late this afternoon I walked up the ridge behind the house on dense granular snow. There have been a couple recent trace powder snows dusting the hard crust making it possible to date the passage of the myriad winter wanderers by the amount of powder accumulated in their tracks. The more powder there is dusted in, the older the tracks. It is almost like a series of transparencies have been laid over the surface of the landscape labeled: tracks of day 1, tracks of day 2, etc. I saw tracks of mink, red squirrel, grouse, coyote, fox, and numerous very small animals - various mice, shrews, voles. These smaller animals are too much for me to figure out. The fox were probably the most interesting because it is breeding season and we seem to have a conjugating couple nearby. They are often walking together almost in the same tracks and wandering apart only for very short investigations of promising nooks and crannies. There are frequent urine spots - I think a part of the mating ritual.

One of the most amazing things of a winter walk is the silence. There is almost no sound. It is astounding to me how infrequently we encounter this phenomenon in daily life. The winter woods are really really quiet. The only sounds were of my own feet crunching on the snow, the sound of a grouse launching into the distance at my approach and the sound of water running under the ice over the small rills and riffs tumbling from the ledges. I pause often, just to hear the silence.

The silence makes the sounds I do hear really stand out. They are like bright colors on a white background. The wings of the departing grouse sound like the bicycle wheel spokes of a slow turning wheel hitting a playing card attached to the fender when I was a kid - a flup, flup, flup, almost as if it is internal to my ear instead of 30 or 40 yards away and fading. It is a ventriloquial effect in that it is hard to tell exactly where the sound is coming from. Spring grouse drumming is similar and one of the magical things about being in the woods. Both sounds, of course, are made by the wings cupping air against the bird's body.

A small unnamed stream flows over the shelves of the ridge from a beaver pond in a large basin like depression near the top of Flemming Mountain behind our house. The stream is completely frozen over but, in this winter silence it can be heard dipping and diving over the rocks beneath, like a heart beat after a scramble up a steep slope - quick and sharp. It is warmer under the skin of ice and snow. The life of the forest has mainly gone underground. Below is a picture of Owl Pate Mountain taken during my walk.