by John Kulish
When the winter’s first ice is only two or three inches thick, I have slipped up to a beaver lodge and jumped onto it, deliberately disturbing the tenants. I could hear a startled occupant splash into an underwater tunnel and could watch as it swam a hundred feet away from the lodge, emitting a trail of tiny white bubbles. Wherever it stopped, a large white bubble would suddenly form. Getting down off the lodge, I tiptoed out onto the windowpane; but the beaver never let me get closer to the newest bubble than a dozen feet. Then it left at a tangent and swam away, again leaving a tell-tale trail, until another large white bubble appeared. I have chased beaver around from bubble to bubble until, tiring of the game, they either re-entered their lodge, or gave me the slip under an overhanging bank.
Whether made by mink, muskrat, beaver, otter, or by methane gas, bubbles leave a pattern as individual as a fingerprint.
This woodsman’s heart’s desire would be to take a group of scientists, preferably chemists, on a field trip along the clear ice of any brook, river, pond, or lake. The scientists need be equipped only with open minds, strong legs, and winter underwear. I can find bubbles. I can tell who blew them. I can repeat the beaver experiment, and let the scientists do the chasing and the concluding. I yearn to understand what chemical miracle occurs during the life-giving moment when a water animal’s nose “touches” ice.
Interpreting sign sometimes demands the use of “woods braille.” On an abandoned tote road, a bunch of feathers lay on lightly crusted snow. Until the previous afternoon, they had belonged to a ruffed grouse. The snow was hard enough to hold up a fox; it would certainly have supported a weasel. But the hardy seed eater had been killed by neither. I picked up a primary feather to scrutinize the quill. Round and firm, it looked normal. But when my fingers moved along the hollow shell, they felt a clue, undiscernible to the eye. The faint indentation was the killer’s mark.
Whenever a goshawk or an owl kills a partridge, it plucks out the primary and secondary, or wingtip, feathers. They interfere with its meal. To do this, it grabs hold of a quill with its powerful, built-in pincers, squeezes, and jerks. The force of the extraction flattens the quill, but only temporarily. Foxes and weasels also prefer plucked partridge, but, in pulling feathers, they puncture them with tooth marks. To be understood, some stories must be read with one’s fingers.
Because life for the strong means death for the weak, many of the plays written by wild animals are tragedies. Even though a human brain gratefully accepts nature’s immutable laws as logical and sound, a human heart cannot help but hurt for the helpless.
Before the freeze-up, the little marsh usually cradled five feet of water, but after four consecutive years of drought, the water table had dropped steadily, until barely eighteen inches covered the spongy bottom. Generations of muskrat had lived out their lives in the little bog. During late October and early November, working night and day, the last of these had built a typically commodious “split level” home. The spacious combination bed-dining-living room were on the upper floor above water. A roomy hall led underwater to the pantry: a marsh full of living water plants. The muskrat knew nothing about the drought. He did what muskrats had always done. How could he comprehend that what had been deep enough for grandfather, was not deep enough for him?
Thicker and thicker, the ice froze. One morning in February, Mr. Muskrat discovered his food was isolated in a deep freeze, for whose sealed door only spring had the combination. Driven by starvation, I could see where he gnawed his way up through the side of his house and slipped out into a fearful blast he had never felt before. A half-mile away, up a long hill was a small pond. Perhaps he could find an unfrozen hole along its shore through which he could slip. Resolutely, he left his home and his marsh.
Muskrat do not walk as smoothly as they swim. As ill at ease on land as humans are underwater, they do not advance in an uninterrupted straight line. Rather, they go off on sudden, sharp tangents, ten or twelve feet long, every twenty yards or so. The exile’s erratic trail scalloped the snow for a hundred yards. When he reached a bank of plowed snow, he slid down into the road. It was covered with two inches of fresh powder, the finest canvas nature makes, snow so airy it would have shown the track of an angel. Without hesitating a moment, the fugitive turned west. He zigzagged up the road, climbing up and sliding down snowbanks, until his unique trail reached halfway to safety.
Meanwhile, reading the sign, I knew that a large mink had entered the swamp from the north. The fresh tracks, permeated with the tantalizing scent of steak on the ice, drove the marauder into the muskrat’s abandoned house. Finding it empty, he began tracking his prey at a fast run. Electrified by visions of fillet, whenever he reached one of the muskrat’s tangents, he ran beyond the scent until hunger shouted, “Slow down, you idiot, you’re going too fast!” He would find the track, straighten it out, and taking jumps from twenty-four to thirty inches long, resume the chase at full throttle. In clear script, the headlong pursuit was written in the snow.
At high noon, on the crest of the hill, the mink had caught up to the muskrat. The lee of a snowbank was polka-dotted with blood. Bits of muskrat and mink fur lay strewn on the snow. Each desperate animal weighed in at about three pounds. Weakened by a more prolonged hunger, the muskrat lost. If it had been able to back up against a stone wall, the story might have ended differently.
The victor had to make a decision. If he left the carcass out in the open, his turn could well come at dusk from a great horned owl. The mink grabbed the bloody victim, and, moving backwards, began to drag it down the hill. Along the plowed road, he tugged and pulled the body back toward the marsh. At the foot of the hill, he turned into the bog and headed for an abandoned beaver lodge. He found a hole among the sticks and stones, then pulled his booty through it. For three delightful days, the mink had feasted on muskrat fillet.
As I studied the tragedy written in snow, I was torn by conflicting emotions: admiration for the pluck of the muskrat, pity for its suffering, wonder for the determination and derring-do of the mink. Only when driven by starvation or sex, will a wild animal risk a plowed road in broad daylight.
It always delights me to come upon a story that does not end in tragedy, but in a bruised ego. It had been a bitterly cold, open winter until a few days before, when a light snow had fallen. Followed by a sudden thaw, the snow had melted. Then a heavy rain began to fall. Because the frozen earth could not absorb the deluge, water formed puddles, some several yards long, in every natural pocket. Abruptly, winter regained control and rammed the thermostat down to zero. The falling rain turned to snow. Soon, three inches of powder camouflaged ice-covered pools.
Shortly after entering the woods, I came across a cat track made several hours before. The cat was traveling at its usual hunting pace: walking silently . . . freezing . . . waiting . . . as it zigzagged through woods and swamps. Steady, one paw in front of the other, the tracks finally led down a slight ridge. At the edge of an alder swamp, they came to a sudden stop. The cat’s pace changed to nine-foot bounds. One . . . two . . . three . . . a turn to the right . . . a long, splayed mark ending in disaster.
While stalking the ridge, this cat had spotted a hare hopping slowly along the edge of the swamp thirty yards below. The cat froze, waiting until its dinner was fifty feet away. Bre’r Rabbit, suddenly realizing it was either quit eating or be eaten, shifted into high. In trying to intercept a fleeing dinner, the cat had to make an unplanned turn. The attack that had started from solid snow ended on ice. Tom’s feet went out from under him as he slid, head over bobtail, for fifteen feet, to crash into some bushes. I could see where he got up, shook himself, let out a string of cat curses, and shaking a clenched paw toward the alder swamp, snarled, “Just wait ’til next time, Bunny Boy.”
Few hunters learn their animal ABC’s. As a guide, I have watched them tiptoe through the woods, rifles cocked, where there have been no deer for weeks. Any hunter who does not learn to read sign intelligently, will hunt forever in a forest of fantasy.
His may even be the excited voice that stammers to a game warden, “The panther! I just saw the Black Panther!”
Each year, the advent of hunting season brings reports of sightings. A high school teacher earnestly told me he had seen one on a back road. (He teaches social studies.) Hunters invariably turn a “rehash” conversation to the panther. Leaning against a bar, one member tells how “it ran across the road in front of my headlights.” With each round, it gets bigger and blacker.
In New Hampshire, as well as in her sister states, reports are received from natives, tourists, hikers, and from weekend nimrods, all of whom just saw the Black Panther. Rabbit hunters, bird hunters, deer hunters, all see it. A few years ago, one deer hunter got close enough to fire several shots, wounding it so severely that “the panther” had to spend three weeks in a local hospital bed licking his wounds.
After a weekend or two of deer hunting, most hunters don’t set foot in the woods again until fishing season begins. Meanwhile, as they drive their cars over winter roads in remote towns, or skim along abandoned tote roads in their snowmobiles, their vehicles overwhelmed by snow-covered, forested mountains on either side, they can imagine almost anything skulking along those ridges.
While they were in their chariots, my snowshoes were criss-crossing snowbound townships daily from daylight to dark, in search of bobcat tracks. It was not unusual to search several days with perfect snow conditions, and not find a single one.
I understand cats. Hunters, they spend more time hunting than I do. They roam a large area at will. Like me, they leave tracks in snow. I have never come across any track that remotely resembled that of a panther. Even if a track could fool me, the gait would not.
Why is it no one ever sees The Phantom when there is snow on the ground? Panthers do not hibernate. The deeper the snow, the lower the temperature, the bigger the appetite!
Did you ever eat wild beechnuts? I have yet to meet a woodsman who didn’t enjoy nibbling on them. But one can try to assuage his hunger by eating them for hours, and still go away hungry. That is what a hare or two would be for a panther, an animal whose average weight is 125 pounds, with some known to reach 200. Such beasts cannot live on hors d’oeuvres. Scientific research has proved that panther boilers demand a deer a night. If there were a panther roaming New Hampshire’s woodlands, the nightly dramas written would be bloodier than King Lear.
Tracks in snow are the easiest to see, but can be the hardest to decipher. A fresh fall of powdery snow in zero weather can preserve tracks exactly as a freezer preserves food. On the other hand, wet, slushy snow distorts any tracks made in it. Hunters have buttonholed me to sputter out a description of the monstrous deer track they had seen. Later the same day, I came across the Goliath and found it to have been made by a David. A small deer, running in wet slush, tells a tall tale. Running hooves, entering snow, force it to be pushed down and outwards beneath their driving momentum, not unlike you or I stomping our way through the same slush, leaving Paul Bunyan footprints.
One morning, I came across the largest human tracks I had ever seen in snow. Both my boots fit easily into a single imprint. Could Frankenstein be hunting in Cheshire County? Fascinated, I followed the trail. It didn’t take long to catch up to the monster. Barely five and a half feet tall, he was wearing the first insulated rubber hunting boots I had ever seen.
4. Woods’ Mysteries: Secrets Nature Won’t Share
Nature’s well-filled stacks hold many exciting mysteries. Those written in the woods do not revolve around “Who?” Rather, they make a reader ask “Why?” Then to puzzle “How?” Over the years, the ones I have read and pondered have filled me with wonder that has spilled over into faith.
Most encyclopedias and other naturalists claim that all foxes dig dens in the ground. This presents a riddle. During forty years of an intimate relationship with at least twenty-five “active” fox burrows, I have yet to see one freshly dug. How do foxes know where the dens are? During years when foxes are not plentiful, many dens display “For Rent” signs. In southern New Hampshire, most dens have not been occupied since the forties, when mange almost annihilated the fox population. Dead branches and leaves conceal deserted doorways.
Foxes do not hibernate, and, like most wild creatures, they sleep all day and hunt all night. When daylight sends their victuals scurrying for cover, foxes search out a flat stone in the open, facing the sun, wrap their fluffy tails, like boas, around their bodies, and curl up to dream of mice and men. They do not need to hide, for a fox’s nose never sleeps. It is a built-in bodyguard, so sensitive it can smell man across 300 yards of forest on a windless day. I know of only three situations when foxes temporarily use a burrow.
In the spring, when she is ready to bear and to raise her young, a vixen searches out an old den, to use as a delivery room and nursery. After she has cleaned and “renovated” the place, she moves in. I have yet to see fresh sand around an occupied fox burrow, only litter and debris the wind may have blown in. When mother has inculcated the pups with all her foxy ways, she breaks up housekeeping. But, wherever they roam, foxes know where to find old burrows.
The second temporary occupancy comes after a heavy snowstorm. While waiting for sun and wind to settle snow, foxes will hole up until the snow is firm enough to support their nimble weight.
The third occasion comes when pressed too hard by a hound as smart and as fast as himself. That’s when a fox, though an outsider in a township, will make a beeline for a burrow that may have been abandoned twenty fox-generations ago. How does it know where to find an ancestral den, dug decades before? With death at his heels, he doesn’t speculate. He knows.
When he had reached his eighties, Arthur Leonard, who had hunted and trapped foxes all his life, had yet to see a freshly dug burrow. The holes my dogs chased foxes into, were the same holes into which his hounds had run foxes when he was fourteen, and the Battle at Appomattox had not yet been fought.
The ultimate satisfaction for a reader of mysteries is to resolve a riddle. In early spring, when the wind begins to smell of melting snow, and the forest floor to reappear, I find tufts of white hair resting on dead leaves. The varying hare has begun a biannual ritual which has piqued and defied scientist and layman alike for years. Twice a year, in a process that takes approximately five weeks in the wild, Mr. Hare changes his overcoat. A third molt occurs with no major color change, because it involves only his underwear. Like any sensible Yankee farmer or woodsman, his long johns are replaced in spring, augmented in winter. That isn’t all. The hare has five toes. In summer, it can see between them as though they were buckhorn sights; but, while it is acquiring a winter coat, a heavy matting of fur is growing between its toes—not to keep its feet warm, but to enable it to skim over the surface of deep snow while foraging for food or while escaping enemies. Nature has strapped a pair of bearpaw snowshoes onto the hare’s hind feet. In early March, when he begins to discard his heavy white ulster, his head turns brown first, his back next, his snowshoes last; but, when early in September, he begins to doff his summer coat, he puts on white snowshoes first, a white jacket next, and an ermine cap last of all. Why? What magic changes the sequence?
Recently, scientists have been able to artificially induce molting in the varying hare, by changing the daily amount of light to which the animals are exposed. It has been proved conclusively that the amount of light received by the hare’s eyes triggers the change in color. Change is the key word. In other experiments, hare held under as much as eighteen constant hours of daily illumination forgot to molt. Up until this time, most people believed molting to be a natural result of weather and temperature. I never did. What shakes me to the soles of my rubber-bottomed, leather-topped boots, is not that scientists have been able to imitate nature, but the fact that the hare itself does not realize that it is white in winter, brown in summer. Hares are color-blind. Do you suppose these scientists think they have solved one of nature’s mysteries? What would happen if they tried the same experiments with t
he red fox?
To me, the most baffling mystery of all is the navigational genius of an otter. A pup, orphaned before it has a chance to travel extensively with its parents, still knows, not only how to go from one place to another, but where he is along the way. Every otter inherits a built-in navigator and a compass. It’s as though all plebes had been born knowing what admirals have to learn.
Shortly after the winter solstice, a pair of otter, while touring the Contoocook River, reached the headwaters of a minor tributary. From Woodward Brook, they watched the sun retreating behind Lovewell Mountain.
“Say, Sweetie,” suggested the dog, “what do you say we go over to Halfmoon Pond? We haven’t been there for a long time, and with all the camps closed, we should be safe. Besides, we’ve always had good fishing in Bog Brook. We should be able to reach it just about dark.”
The pair swam north toward the outlet to tiny Ayers Pond, whimsically perched atop a 1,700-foot ridge. They were heading for a beaver pond they had visited a previous year in late autumn. There had been a prolonged drought that summer and fall, and they had had to pick their way over a dry streambed. It had been a rough trip. Otter hiking boots are not equipped with Vibram lug soles.