Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [66]
There is a sudden whirr of wings from a heavy bird behind me. It is probably a grouse coming out of cover in the thick pines to feed on buds up in the bare branches of a poplar or birch. The snow is not yet deep enough to tunnel into to hide and stay warm.
A movement catches my eye: A long black shape comes loping onto the pond from the edge of the cattail patch. A mink. After coming out onto the pond, the water weasel lopes over to the larger of the two muskrat lodges, briefly examines it, and continues on to the next one nearby, the smaller one.
I hear a musical twitter of a flock of snow buntings who are flying by, high overhead. They’ve come from north of Hudson Bay. They are the snow birds, and winter is not far behind. Two crows fly by, cawing loudly. The mink pauses a few seconds along-side the muskrat lodge, then runs on across the pond, past the two still immobile dark shapes along the slush hole, and then on into the cattails on the other side.
I stand as still as before. I’m mesmerized. It is getting light now. The snowflakes continue their soothing rustle on my jacket. A raven croaks in the distance, from where it comes every morning at dawn. Tree sparrows, migrants from the Arctic tundra, stopped in the bog a few days ago to fatten up on seeds. Their sweet-sounding sing-song notes resound back and forth, as they stay hidden close to the ground under the alders at the pond edge. They’ll be gone in a few days. Suddenly I hear a tinkling-rustling sound right next to me. I look down and see a blade of sedge wiggle. A tiny load of snow slides off. A flash of movement. A moving black dot. It’s the eye of an immaculately white weasel. The weasel disappears, reappears somewhere else as if by magic from under snow-covered grass. I see now a fresh mouse track. Probably deer mouse, given the tail-drag and the long stride. Flushed prey? The weasel dashes from one clump of grass to another, crossing the mouse’s trail. The weasel stands up, extending its slender six inch body toward a tiny rustle, looks in that direction, then dashes off. In seconds it is back, standing tall and looking at me. Fearless, focused, improbably alert, and powered with unbounded restless energy, it soon again disappears from sight. (Following its track, I later found where it had dragged something, leaving drops of blood on the snow.)
I’m becoming ever-more curious about those two immobile black lumps on the ice. Are they the heads of otters peering up out of the water? Two miniature hunched-up beavers? Maybe muskrats.
It is light, finally, and one of the lumps slides into the slushy water. Muskrat it is. Its companion stays put. Within about one minute the diver is back, sculls briefly around the slush pool, and hauls out next to its companion. It sits up and preens its fur. The other looks around, and then also slips down for a dip. Their lodge looking like a miniature beaver lodge, is within a few seconds’ swim under the ice, but the rats stay outside in the open on the ice. (I found them here off and on for the rest of the day whenever I checked.)
By the next day the pond was totally frozen over. The entrance to the rat’s mud and cattail castle, of soon-to-be-rock-solid cattail-reinforced ice, was under water. It had been the rats’ last chance to see daylight. Now they would be sealed in for almost half the year. Only the warm spring sun melting the ice will eventually release them. I suspect they have no notion of what lies ahead in the months to come—and for that matter, neither do I.
Usually when I gaze over the pond in the weeks and months after the ice has sealed it in, I see only the reminders of the pulsating life it supports and harbors. I see the sedges along the edge that in late April or May shoot up like sharp green lances. In winter they are bent into mounds and weighted down with snow. The cattails that hide the deep nests of red-wings cradling light blue eggs