The Old Ones were nervous. They took pains to hide their fear from the young birds now facing their first Winter, of course, but this well-meaning deception was always doomed to fail, and little Taiga felt more and more uneasy with every passing minute. Despite this, he made the most of the warm breeze that ruffled the feathers on his breast. He’d already survived one frigid night, after all, waiting patiently for the sun to transit the great unknown country between dusk and dawn, while clear ice formed right across the big lake. That night had seemed endless. He’d been wakened repeatedly by the penetrating cold, hoping each time to see the sun’s red orb inching above the horizon, but instead finding only the wan globe of an icy moon reflected in the frozen lake’s glassy surface. Not even dawn had brought warmth, and snow soon started to fall—big, lazy flakes that drifted down through the gelid air, flakes as light as down and as cheerless as the cry of a hunting hawk. It had snowed all day, blanketing the forest in a white shroud and turning the welcoming landscape into something alien and ominous.

But that was all in the past now, nothing more than an unpleasant memory. The snow had already melted back to a few dingy tatters, and the lake was once again ice-free. Could it be Spring already? It seemed too good to be true. Taiga had heard the Old Ones’ tales about Winters past, about months of short chilly days and endless frosty nights, nights when the bark on the big maples burst open with explosive force and the ice on the lake groaned and heaved like a living thing, nights when the Family huddled together in their roost, nestled deep in the cedar thicket, each bird taking his or her turn in the most exposed spots. Were these just stories? Taiga wondered. Is Winter already over? Taiga asked his mother, but her reply did nothing to cheer him up. No, she had said, Winter was only beginning, and the unseasonable warmth would soon be followed by another onslaught of cold weather. Gather food while you can, she said. Store it in as many places as possible: crevices in the bark of trees, the spaces between the scales in old pine cones, anywhere safe. And make sure you remember where you put it, she concluded. Winter is just beginning. You will need all your stored food before it’s over. You can never have too much. And then she left him to forage for food herself.

Taiga followed in her wake. He found a cone that still had seeds in it—That was lucky! he thought—and some withered pin-cherries, as well, and he surprised a hapless moth who shouldn’t have been fluttering about in Winter. Perhaps the moth also believed the cold weather was over and Spring had begun, Taiga mused, as he beat it against a branch before gulping it down. Then he resumed his search for seeds and berries to add to his Winter stores, always taking care to note exactly where he put everything.

The day passed quickly. Before long the pallid December sun had disappeared behind a low wall of dirty gray clouds, and a freshening breeze was tossing the tops of the tallest pines from side to side. A few clods of old snow that had survived the thaw were now hurled to the ground with liquid Splats! Red squirrels shouted insults at everything and everyone—at the snow bombs hurtling down from the pines, at the deer who stood on their hind legs to reach the tender tips of the hemlock boughs, at one another, at the wind itself.

Grizzle, the oldest of the Old Ones and the head of the Family, turned his face into the breeze for a minute, considering what to do next. It was time to seek shelter, he decided, and he called the Family together. They flew to him from all the points of the compass, then headed off to their roost, pausing only long enough to get a last drink from the lake. Once they reached the cedars, Taiga took his accustomed place on a branch, wedged tight between his brother Musk and his sister Bright. Together they settled down to meet the challenge of the long Winter night.

Taiga woke with a start. He’d been dreaming of sultry August evenings. But the scene that greeted him was far from sultry. The tall cedar lashed back and forth like a sapling in a summer thunderstorm. The wind shrieked. Sleet and snow hissed through the dense evergreen thicket. All the Family were awake now, and they struggled to keep hold of their branch as the cedar tossed and gyrated in the gale.

SNAPPPPP! The branch broke without warning, and Taiga was flung headlong into the howling dark. He called out to the others—Chickadee! Chickadeedeedee!—but his cries were lost in the roar of the wind and the crash of falling limbs. Now Taiga was on the ground. Snow had already drifted deep. He tried to fly back up into the tree to rejoin the Family, but the wind was too strong for him. So he huddled close against the trunk of the cedar, instead, calling again and again: CHICKADEE! CHICKADEE! CHICKADEEDEEDEE! No answer came. The wind screeched. Branches smashed down only inches from his beak. Snow stung his face. But he heard no familiar voices, and there was nothing he could do to make himself more comfortable. He could only wait for morning. Read more…

 
Send a Comment

 
To answer the questions of a number of enquiring folks, YES, I did decide on which digital SLR I wanted. Here’s a sneak peak at my new Pentax K200D, captured for all eternity by my excellent point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot A550 digicam while on a winter hike. I’ve had the DSLR for a week and am impressed with its quality and ease of use. I’ll post a more detailed report on this camera in a few days. Stay tuned…

 
Send a Comment

 
Canoe country. It’s also snow country, and General Winter’s annual invasion marks the end of the paddling season for many canoeists and kayakers. Many, that is, but not all. Brazil has as much claim to the title as, say, Ontario, and it doesn’t often snow in the Amazon Basin. But the “canoe country” that I’m thinking of is mostly a state of mind, a place whose boundaries were defined in the birch-bark chronicles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers like Nessmuk, Calvin Rutstrum, and (more recently) Bill Mason. In any case, round about December, give or take, a fair bit of the northern hemisphere starts to look like the scene described so evocatively in Christina Rossetti’s “Mid-Winter”: Earth…hard as iron/Water like a stone. From then until ice-out, millions of canoes and kayaks languish in their storage cradles, collecting dust or shrouded in snow. And by January their owners are getting stir-crazy.

 
What’s a snowbound paddler to do? I’ve explored options for the home front in a couple of earlier columns. Now, however, it’s time to think about ways to engage General Winter on his own territory. There’s no shortage of alternatives, and some are heavily promoted. Downhill skiing and snowmobiling, for example. But these won’t interest anyone who prizes silence, solitude, and independence. Many turn to cross-country skiing, instead, though here, too, solitude is hard to come by. Most cross-country skiing is done on trails, and many trails are crowded, particularly on weekends. Worse yet, an increasing number are multi-use highways, shared with snowmobiles and ATVs. The result? Skiers looking for a chance to stretch their legs and breathe deep in cold, crisp, clean air—”straight from the North Pole,” in the words of one hopeful, if naive, neighbor—find themselves slogging through a stinking miasma of unburned fuel and two-stroke oil instead, coughing and gagging and longing for the comparative tranquility of their morning commute in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, cross-country skiers can always leave the trails and strike out…well…cross-country. It seems only natural. But it isn’t as easy as the pictures in the catalogs suggest. Off-trail travel in unbroken snow is hard work, for one thing. And much of canoe country is forested. Skiing through dense stands of cedar, hemlock, and spruce is a sweaty, scratchy business, periodically enlivened by the snow-covered hollows that form around the trunks of big trees. Every backcountry skier eventually learns just how hard it is to climb out of a hole wearing six-foot-long shoes.

Sooner or later, though, the forest gives way to an open slope, and gravity takes control. In seconds, the sweat-soaked skier is sliding downhill, going faster and faster as the gradient steepens. It’s hard not to be exhilarated. This is what skiing’s all about: freedom and speed. But freedom isn’t free, is it? There’s a price to be paid, and the bill comes due when the plummeting adventurer skids on a patch of ice and slams into the only tree on the slope, or soars over an unexpected drop, invisible in the white sameness of the winter landscape ó or when he simply catches an edge and takes a tumble. And then something snaps. Painfully. Suddenly, the crowded trails that the skier left behind don’t seem so bad. Even a passing pack of snowmobiles would be welcome. Yet none appears.

You get the point, I’m sure. Backcountry skiing can be dangerous, and even expert skiers suffer occasional misadventures in the brooding hills. The novice is best advised to stick to gentle, groomed trails and take the crowds in stride. Does this mean that only experts and daredevils can find silence and solitude in the depths of winter? Happily, things aren’t this bad. Skis aren’t the only way to explore the frozen world. You can also do it on snowshoes. Read more