Red at dawn, and red again at sunrise for the last day of regular firearms deer season. Finally, at fifteen minutes past sunrise, a rifle booms. Then silence again.
dawn
The moon’s bright bowl full of darkness rises through the trees at dawn and vanishes into clouds. Two great-horned owls on the valley side of the mountain carry on duetting.
A gloomy dawn lightened by brief scatterings of sleet. The muffled notes of a Carolina wren issue from a hole in the road bank.
Dawn. A rustle in the leaves as bits of ice and half-frozen raindrops begin falling from the sky. From the lilac, the ticking of a wren.
Crystal-clear and very still at dawn. A last meteor disappears into the spreading spill of light on the eastern horizon.
First frost here and there like someone’s first white hairs. I crunch through it en route to the top of the field to watch the dawn approaching from 50 miles away.
In the half-light, a patter of hooves from just inside the woods. The grunts of a buck in rut. A dawn sky coming through the trees.
Between dawn and sunrise, a small rainstorm’s pleasant susurration drowns out everything else. As it eases, a Carolina wren takes over, caroling in a minor key.
Overcast and still, with a low rumble of traffic from the east. In the half-light, a deer’s ear pivots among the goldenrod.
Dawn: the red thread of a contrail fraying as it fades. Fog rises from the goldenrod, erasing the faint dot that must’ve been Mercury.
Half an hour before sunrise, the goldenrod is already aglow. Venus and Jupiter fade into a cloudless sky. Towhees begin to tweet.
Just at the point where the half-moon loses its share of the shadows, a migrant thrush calls from the woods’ edge: a few soft notes, then silence. The sky turns pink.
The last stars gutter in the dawn light. Down-hollow, a juvenile whippoorwill practices its song—only half there.
Crystal-clear and still. At first light, the soft calls of wood thrushes, no doubt tired and hungry after their all-night flights. Pale crowds of snakeroot seem to glow.