Cold and still at sunrise. With more than a foot of new-fallen snow, the woods’ edge is an asemic text already being edited by squirrels.
gray squirrel
The slow, steady accumulation of dry snow. A raven flies low over the trees with something in its beak. A squirrel’s short-lived footprints.
Rain and fog at daybreak. Some intrepid deer hunter fires a single shot. I wonder how dry the squirrels are in their high, ball-shaped dreys.
With my hat pulled down, I miss whatever winged predator suddenly sets the squirrels off. Maybe it knows how to use the low sun as a cover.
Overcast and cold. A squirrel is picking up fallen black walnuts, removing their rotten husks, and burying them in the half-frozen yard.
A break in the gloom as a thin spot in the clouds crosses the sun. Two squirrels locked in combat fall 20 feet to the ground like an enormous fruit.
Deep blue sky. A squirrel is making unusually exuberant, risky leaps from tree to tree, flinging herself into space, trusting in twigs.
Mackerel sky like a furrowed brow. One, three, six blue jays descend on the feeder. The squirrel flees. One jay screams like a hawk.
Under a low cloud ceiling, the thunder of trains and traffic from the valley. The black cat’s deadly silence trips a gray-squirrel alarm.
A squirrel on the porch spots a squirrel in the yard, who freezes. S/he walks slowly under my propped-up legs and down to a silent meeting.
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
A warmer morning; the blue sky harbors an ever-so-slight suggestion of haze. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling open a black walnut.
Mizzle. A squirrel emerges from under the porch, spots me, and rears up with one front paw tucked into its chest hair like rodent Napoleon.