Naturalist November

Late November

Just before the recent snow fell, I stopped along the walk I take most
mornings and saw four ducks paddling around on the beaver pond.
The pond was slate-gray and flat, in that hunter's stillness November balances
on. The air is chilled, but not yet wintry. The trees are bare. Their branches are
gray and skeletal, and ragged white clouds knot in dark blue sky. Hardly a
breath of wind.
I crossed the road and climbed up the short, steep bank of dead grass. Over
white-green moss and juniper, under cedars and tattered spruces, I made my
way to the edge of the pond, which is held back by the outcropping of ledge
where I stood and a makeshift barrier of deadwood and leaves which is
leaking. A hundred feet across the pond is a beaver dome of piled and
interlaced sticks. By the far shore were the ducks. They looked like black
ducks.
I watched them glide around on the shale-like water. From time to time one
stuck his head under and after a pause came up spluttering and spraying beads
of cold water around. They meandered in the direction of the beaver dome.
Suddenly there was splashing and wingbeats, and they were airborne, rising
like seaplanes. The strange thing about this is how they all spring together - not
one after the other, or three following one who panicked, but all at the same
instant. They flapped almost in unison and climbed smoothly over the water
and the beaver dome, then the frost-crusted hayfield beyond.
About the time they crossed the shoreline, a great blue heron arose like an
apparition from the reeds the other side of the beaver house. It was shaped like
an assembly of joints, with sharp head and long neck, immense pointed wings
and slate-blue sticklike body. It had the angles of a pterodactyl and the
beauties dinosaurs lacked, and it was, amazingly, totally silent.
Its wings stroked slowly and powerfully, moving without pressure, almost,
over the wet leaves in the autumn chill. It seemed to float through the air,
headed westerly behind the ducks.
Weeks earlier in October, as I was walking up the driveway near the house, a
motion over the brook in the fir woods twicked the corner of my eye. I
hesitated and turned, and saw a gray-blue winged shape rise from the brook,
waft up through the trees, and vanish. It was noiseless as the woods. It had the
size and shape of a heron, but how could a bird that large navigate through
hemlocks and pines? I wondered if I hadn't seen a woodland ghost leak from a
crack between two seconds.
The heron over the pond also ascended in complete November silence. The
pond surface was undisturbed, and all I heard for some moments was water
trickling out through the stick dam and across rocks into the gulley by the
road. Everything had paused, as if taking one last breath before winter, and
then was quietly gone.