Bluejay Makes a Laughing Sound?

November 20, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:  I tell Moi I want to do the morning walk again – why shouldn’t I get to experience the crisp morning air rather than the stale air of the afternoon?  But we have a little argument about it: I’m ready to go, having just thrown on my walking clothes, while Moi takes a bath, washes her hair, has to let her hair dry, and expresses her worry that I’m going to take over the morning walk and exclude her from it.  I reassure her that I don’t want to do that.  Right now I’m still waiting for her to get dressed (Mway’s also waiting, out on the back porch).  Just as I write this, Moi stomps down the stairs fully dressed.  (Though now the phone just rang, and she’s talking on that – .)

State of the Path:  Down in the kitchen Moi says she wishes she had a bright red scarf to wear, then puts on her camouflage jacket.  I put on what looks like a new pair of gloves.  “Those are your new gloves,” Moi explains,  “Your old ones were filled with holes and I threw them out.”  Out in the back yard, Mway picks her fetching stick up in her mouth and disappears down the path at the outbuilding (it’s the stick I’ve been using – with a gash and a crack in it, but slim, long, and good for throwing).  While Moi dawdles looking at the chickens, Mway reappears, stick in her mouth, at the outbuilding, as if to say “aren’t you guys coming?”  A monkey vine that drapes over the trees at the building seems to be sagging more than it did before.  It forms, I realize to my delight, another monkey vine portal.  At the garden pond, I see Mway’s dropped the stick and I pick it up.  Beyond the pig pen, I ask Moi if she wants to go straight or take the side path.  She opts for the side path.  I point out a big bird flying in the sky over Hutchinson’s field.  I thinks it’s a hawk, Moi thinks a duck.  “It had a long neck,” she says.  Mway wanders over to the old dump and starts sniffing under a tree.  While Moi goes over to investigate, I note that a few old berries still remain on the Arum honeysuckles.  We round the bend, and Mway starts sniffing around the brush where the doe had jumped up from.  “She’s on the trail of something,” Moi comments.  We come back to the main path, walk through the maples.  Moi sees a bird flying back up toward the sumacs, and I’m able to tell her that it’s a black-capped chickadee.  There’s a lot of water on the path, and I’m grateful to have my new pair of boots.  Along the creek, we hear the chickens back at the house squawking.  Moi wonders if they’re being disturbed by something.  “Well,” I tell her, “we just saw something that was probably a hawk.”  Moi sees some garlic grass and asks me if this just came up.  I tell her that I saw it in the early spring (maybe even during the winter?), and it’s always out in cool weather.  A multiflora branch snags my wool cap and I struggle to detach it, Moi looking at me and chuckling.  “Well, for one thing,” she says, “your cap’s not down on your head – it’s jutting way up high.”  As we walk along the creek, Moi points out again that some day the path’s going to go caving in.  We cross the swale, where water’s still trickling, then I cross the plank, Mway stepping into the water in the feed channel then hopping out.  As soon as I take a few steps on the plank, it seems to wobble more than usual, and I wonder if Moi’s stepping on it with me and making it shake.  But when I look back, I see she’s waiting for me to cross first before she steps on it.  At the exit channel, which has water trickling out of it, I point out the little animal skull on the ridge; Moi is intrigued by it.  I mention the catty-nine-tails in the skating pond.  “That must mean there’s a lot of moisture there all year round?” I venture.  “Yes,” Moi says, “That’s why it failed as a skating pond.  We could never get in there to keep the grass mowed down in it.”  I cross the plank, and it wobbles a lot again.  I look back at Moi.  “The reason the board shakes so much when you walk across it,” she says, “is because of your European splayed feet.”  She demonstrates how she can easily walk across it, naturally keeping her toes pointed straight forward.  We stop at her pines, and I walk up to a tree growing up close to the ridge, apparently an offspring of the trees Moi originally planted.  “I think we’ve seen that before,” Moi says.  She goes through the break in the ridge and starts hiking up toward the clearing.  I linger for a moment, suddenly hearing a bird down by the creek making a strange call, almost like an artificial turkey gobble, and I call Moi back.  All I can see in the trees is a bluejay, cawing like a crow.  “Did you hear that strange bird sound?” I ask Moi when she gets back.  “Yeah,” she says, “it sounded like laughing.  Ha-huh-hah-ha-ha-huh-hah.”  I tell her it must have been the bluejay.  There’s a lot of water in the path on the other side of the ridge, a collecting point for moisture in the field; again I’m glad I have my good boots.  Before we reach the clearing, Moi talks again about the two cedars she inspected yesterday:  “They must be two different kinds.  The one looks like it has little turds on it.”

State of the Creek:  The water is low enough, and apparently warm enough, that Mway wades into it at her favorite spot below the tree stand.

The Fetch:  In the clearing, I hand Moi the stick to throw.  She frowns but takes it, gives it a big heave past the “chokeberry” down into the goldenrod.  As the stick sails through the air, I hear the wind singing around it – I wonder if the crack in the stick is making the sound.  As Moi hurls the stick a few more times, I knock over a goldenrod stalk with my walking stick, then just poke around with it in the wet ground.  Mway eventually comes back chomping the slim, cracked stick in her mouth, but Moi doesn’t want to have anything to do with anything like going on to level 2; she turns around, muttering “Okay, enough of that.  I have other things to do.”