Same Deer As Before?

November 17, 2010.  Wednesday.

Situation:  Yesterday it was nice to take Mway for a walk in the morning and not have to rush, as I so often have to do in the afternoon (before or after work), so I tell Moi I’ll take Mway for her morning walk again today. It rained hard last night, even thundered and lightninged, and I’m curious to see what the creek looks like.  Also, I’ll bring along the Audubon, try to look at some other characteristics that will help me identify what Moi’s pines are.

State of the Path:  The lilac bushes around the house have shed half their leaves.  The chickens are lined up at the door of their cage, waiting for Moi to feed them and let them out.  The willow above the corn crib still has many of its leaves.  I walk by the garden pond, filled with water (as it has been for some time now), walking upon damp leaves, soundless underfoot.  Mway bounds past the side path, and I call her back, and we both follow the path along the old orchard.  The wind is roaring, swirling in the bare black walnut trees.  The Arum honeysuckles have also shed a lot of their leaves, which lie green on top of the bed of the brown black walnut leaves.  I round the cedar (or whatever the evergreen is out there), and I realize that I’ve forgotten the Audubon.  The brown goldenrod is bent over in the path; the stalks seem to have lost some of their fuzz, or maybe the fuzz is just dull colored from the rain.  There are patches of goldenrod that have been flattened by the rain.  As I’m pushing my way through the bent-over weeds, I suddenly catch out of the corner of my eye a large doe rising from the brush in the center of the field around which the path circles, probably the same doe I saw the other day.  She leaps over weeds and bushes, almost silently, heading toward Hutchinson’s field, her white tail sticking up and looking almost like Atlas’s long tail.  Unlike the other day, she didn’t run away when she first saw me, but waited till I had rounded the path, apparently not knowing that if she had not moved I would never have been aware she was there.  Mway sniffs around the sides of the path, not even noticing her.  Heading into bug land, I can hear water squooshing underneath my boots.  There’s a small puddle here and there near the pin oaks, and once again I’m so glad to have boots without cracks in them.  I walk along the creek, stooping carefully so my cap doesn’t get snagged, noticing more honeysuckles that have begun to shed leaves (they are more yellow down here).  When I get to the locust trees, I look out into bug land and see water pooled up in the brown grass. I cross the plank (water in the feed channel reaching back to the skating pond), round the crest of the skating pond, pass through the “chokeberries,” and before I reach the pines, I see a bird’s nest in a small maple on the ridge.  I wonder if it’s still in use.  I go over to the pines, angry at myself for not bringing the book, but I know there’s one characteristic I can check out that I hadn’t before: whether or not the cones are thorny.  When I look at the cones, at first they don’t look quite as egg-shaped as they did yesterday, but I figure that must be just all in my head.  I can’t tell if the cones are thorny by looking; I have to touch them, and I go from one cone to the next: they are definitely prickly.  Audubon tells me that red pine cones are “without prickle” -- so rule red pine out.  It doesn’t tell me whether the table mountain pines are prickly or not.  It says that scotch pine cones are “often with minute prickle.”  I don’t like the sound of that, because I don’t even know what that means.  Maybe the pines are Virginia pines, also called scrub pine, or Jersey pine.  They have cones that are “narrowly egg-shaped…with long slender prickles.”  They also grow in clay, which is the soil of bug land.  As I’m feeling the cones, a bird starts scolding me.  I look up and eventually see a bluejay, flying from branch to branch of the sumacs on the ridge.  I wonder if it will head to that nest, but it doesn’t go there.

State of the Creek:  The stream is up, green water moving swiftly, too swiftly for Mway to even think about wading into it.  It’s well within its banks though, but I see places where the water swept over grass and weeds last night.  Little waterfalls here and there, rocks making ripples but themselves mostly hidden beneath the water.  When I get to the log jam, at first I think the water is passing over the big log, but then I realize that the big log is gone.  I look at the next bend, and I see it lying against another big log that must have been lodged there against the bank before.  I can’t tell for sure because the water’s so high, but it may be that the log jam has been cleared, although there’s still a smaller branch that lies athwart the creek.  I can’t imagine how the big log must have been moved, and I’m amazed that it didn’t get caught on the shore and was carried down as far as it was.  I walk along the narrows, water rushing alongside my feet.  I wonder if the plank over the swale has been swept away, but it’s still there, sunk it seems a little more into the ground.  A pool of water has formed at the dirt bar, and just beyond there’s a pile of foam that’s bubbling up high in some debris.  I didn’t think about it then, but I wonder now what’s happened to the vinyl siding.

The Fetch:  I toss the stick each time at least a few feet into the goldenrod, and much of the time pitch it back down toward the path or behind the “chokeberry,” so Mway, in bringing it back, will pass through the goldenrod and stay away from the middle of the clearing which is streaked with water.  She fetches the stick I don’t know how many times, then when she comes back without dropping it, seemingly ready to move to level 2, I tell her to “put it down” about four times, and when she doesn’t, I stomp away back toward the house.  On the path along the sumacs, I see a little flock of black-capped chickadees fleeing away from me in short flights (I imagine it might be the same flock I saw the other day).  One chickadee lingers behind, sitting on a sumac branch, and I get so close to it I could almost reach out and snatch it up in my hand, before it too flies away.