When I set out in the morning, conditions were perfect for tracking. It had snowed during the night, and a dusting of downy flakes now covered the two‑inch crust that was the only remnant of last week’s storm. I couldn’t ask for more. So I shouldered my rucksack with its load of essentials and camera gear and hit the trail to see what I could see.

My breath fogged before my face until I pulled a neck‑gaiter over my mouth. Even then my eyes watered in the freshening breeze. The red line in the thermometer hadn’t yet hit the ten‑degree mark, and the snow squeaked underfoot with each step I took. A low sun shone wanly through the nearly leafless beeches and feathery hemlocks, rendering the wooded hillside in stark chiaroscuro. Chickadees chattered in the cedars and nuthatches honked in reply, their piping voices barely audible above the baritone rumble of The River. In the distance, trees cracked like rifle shots as the early light warmed the hidden folds in the surrounding hills. Meanwhile, a steady rain of tiny ice shards showered down on me as I walked.

Red squirrels scolded from high branches while I read the record of their recent movements in the fresh snow. The forest’s night shift had been at work, too. A network of new paths showed where mice had scampered between fallen limbs and clumps of nodding weed stalks, and the swift sallies of foraging shrews were evident in a crisscross tracery of tunnels. Then, as I skirted the outlying sentries of a grove of hemlocks, I saw the first signs that a porcupine had also passed this way.

At just that point in the trail, a towering hemlock hangs over the Narrows, a rocky cleft through which The River rushes darkly between bulging buttresses of root‑beer‑brown ice. Scuff marks and scattered fragments of bark showed me where the porcupine had inched down the hemlock’s trunk, using his tail as a prop. Tips of hemlock boughs and tiny cones littered the snow, giving ample evidence that he — of course, “he” might have been a she; I’ll stick to “he,” though — had dined well. But now, having eaten, he was on his way home. His tracks showed where he’d come from and where he was going. Wanting to know more of his story than I could read in that one spot, I followed him into the hemlock wood… Read more…

 
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