A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  But I jump-shot this one duck, the one we'll enjoy tonight, late last fall in Maine. The weather had been too rainy and miserable for tromping through dense brush for grouse, so my partner Dave Tobey and I floated Tomah Stream in his canoe, the vast majority of ducks canny enough as not to let us drift up on them, but this one lingering just adequately long.

  My wife and I are craving this evening meal. Not to have eaten wild duck for almost two-thirds of our married lives has felt like a deprivation. Not, of course, the sort of deprivation that huge portions of humanity suffer when it comes to nourishment, but one we have registered nonetheless whenever we've spotted a skein of fall blacks in flight overhead or dabbling far ahead of us as we paddle the Connecticut River.

  Hunting ducks over decoys is very different from shooting upland birds in New England. Grouse and woodcock inhabit succession forest, the thicker the better, its edges a confoundment of berry-cane, hardhack, popple whip, and so on. Even if one is lucky enough to own a pointing dog who'll pin a ground bird , and I've been multiply so blessed, the instant available to pull the trigger on each of these birds is just that—an instant. One tends to see ducks, on the other hand, well before he can legitimately shoot at them. Often they will circle four or five times before deciding to come into range, and you use your call as expertly as you know how, hoping to draw them over the floating blocks.

  As I write this, then, I picture myself, either alone with Topper or one of his predecessors, or with bosom hunting pals, moving only my eyeballs to keep tabs on the flight. But whether consciously or not—and it's surely a conscious thing now—I likewise take in the austere beauty of late autumn, the dark hues of oak leaves clinging stubbornly to riverside trees, the pilasters of mist rising straight as string from the surface; the sun, a pallid disc just breaching Sunday Mountain. I catch the wet of Topper's feet and shins, of the cold mud around us.

  Life is more than worthwhile. A shame it should pass so quickly.

  I recall from my childhood how Warner Brothers' cat Sylvester would contemplate Tweetie the canary, his vision morphing into the tiny bird dressed like a turkey, those small frilly leggings on either side, the perfectly browned breast steaming on a platter. I confess to similar hallucinations on spying a duck as it approaches my blind, so greatly do I prefer the taste of wild duck to that of any other wild game. Yes, undeniably, a wild duck is one of the hunter's great treats. And yet I am certain that my own yen for the bird has something to do with memories that aren't entirely restricted to taste.

  My oldest child's namesake, Creston MacArthur, had a tight little cabin on Third Machias Lake. He and I used to spread decoys off a certain point there, and when we were lucky, we might paddle back to the camp with five or six ducks after a morning's hunt. After the ancient wood-fired cook stove took the chill out of our bones, we'd step outside again to dress the birds, scattering the lovely feathers to the breeze and leaving the insides down in a wetland for the mink and raccoons.

  Come evening, we'd kindle the outdoor fire in its ring of stones and, having caged the ducks in a basket broiler, we'd lean the handle against a section of cross-laid road grader blade, which Creston had fetched from somewhere, so that the meat stood in front of the fire and would not char.

  You didn't want to cook them too long; the juices still needed to run red when you cut into the meat. Creston and I would sit out there in the dark, eating the ducks with our hands as the few loons left on the lake took up their mournful wails. These were old loons, the young ones already flown to open coastal water. Under the stars of late fall, sharp as razors, we heard one another chewing, groaning, sighing with satisfaction. Now and then a fox might bark along the edge of the marsh, or a loitering bittern, who should have been gone with the young-of-the-year loons, would make that thumping sound for which Creston called the bird "post-driver."

  Those meals were more than good. So too the old songs he would sing afterwards, his voice at once rough and tuneful, ones passed down by woodsmen and river-drivers: "The Shores of Gaspereau," "The Lumberjack's Alphabet," and all the rest. I see Creston lift his chin for the high notes, his eyes near popping, his face the very picture of glee.

  I've already said elsewhere how I miss him, though he's more than three decades in the grave.

  I know there was something primitive about our whole ritual. In spite of that (because of that?) there was also something, well, ritual about it too, if you'll spare me some circular logic. Even my own family, seeking as we do to buy local meat and produce whenever possible, having insisted when our children still lived at home that we eat together as a family—even my own family has lost some touch with that ritual basis of consuming our foodstuff. We may not resort to McDonald's or one of its odious equivalents; we don't consume prepared or processed food; but we do seem in a hurry: we need to get fuel into our systems like anyone, but professions and projects seem to tug at us.

  Our kids are gone, four of the five with their own careers, the youngest midway through college. Robin and I are apt as not on certain evenings merely to scramble a couple of eggs, make a salad, and sit at the kitchen island for a quarter-hour or so before she heads off to prep a law school class and I, in my retirement, having written most of the day if I've been so moved, to find a suitably challenging crossword puzzle, a televised NBA game, a good novel, or collection of poems. The notion of a meal as a communal, bonding function appears to be fading as quickly as the art of writing letters, even in our rather culturally conservative house.

  Tonight's duck will do its part in contravening the anti-ritualism of modern eating habits. My wife is off teaching, and I have spent the better part of two hours getting Annie's sauce just so (though I can't ever get it quite to where she could; I need a little flour to thicken it, as she never did). I will split a passel of oak logs fairly fine, so that they will break down to coals the more quickly (there I go!); I will lay a few strips of paper birch bark into the hearth, arrange adequate kindling on top of it, then tent the hardwood splits over the kindling.

  I will remember chill mornings with friends of a lifetime—Landy Bartlett, Joey Olsen, Peter Woerner, Terry Lawson—as we waited for the ducks to give us a peek; I will remember dear dead folks I loved as well: my father, Creston himself. I'll remember the many times around the many twilight blazes.

  My history, or at least some glorious moments within it, will burst into mind as the duck's juices burst onto my palate; in fact they have already burst into my thoughts as I write this down. It is perhaps the recollection of wood smoke that slightly burns my eyes until they water a little.

  Snowdust

  Midmorning yesterday, in an unusually cold and lowery March, I kissed my wife a temporary goodbye where she always follows the trail uphill to complete The Loop, as we call it. Professionally, she was busier than I in my early experience of retirement, and her yen for quick exercise displayed an urgency I had no obligation to share.

  She was busier—and a lot faster. We're essentially of identical height, but her thirty-six-inch inseam, as compared to my stubby thirty-one, floats her willowy frame ahead of me at a speed to give me a workout before my intended one begins. I stood a moment to watch her, as ever a glory in my eyes, practically loping uphill. When we embraced, she smelled of cold fresh air. I love that scent.

  For her part, she loves repetition, following The Loop every day, savoring its nonpareil view of Moosilauke to our east, the trail's every hollow and ledge her familiar. I prefer exploration, novelty, instinctively getting off-trail as soon as I head out on a ramble, especially during a good winter for snow like this one, when I can pass over the buried brush rather than fighting through it as I must in warmer months. I like that wide whiteness under the canopy, inscribed only by the movements of wild things, whose doings remain a fascination for me, no matter the season.

  It wasn't long yesterday morning, in fact, before I came on a clear and perfect narrative: the twin stabs of a fisher exploding at a ragged hole in snow, around which the delicate
rusts and grays of grouse feathers and a few little umlauts of blood showed vivid. The bird must have been resting under powder, and couldn't burst out in time to avoid the predator.

  There's always something to read out there. So said Donald Chambers, Maine guide, woodsman and lovable friend, and no one has said it better since. I can hear Don's words to this hour, can watch him, short fireplug of a man, making his pronouncement, then sniffing and thumbing his glasses back up his pug nose, his curious habit after passing judgments, which tended to the sage and benign.

  Don had an efficiency about him that I always marveled at, vowed to imitate, and by temperament simply couldn't. He would not have understood my urge to meander the way I did yesterday. If there was a place to walk or paddle to, you went directly from here to there. Carrying a pail of water up from the lakeshore to make coffee, you lifted it no more than a sixteenth of an inch over any rock or stump in your way. Why waste energy?

  Efficiency—and deliberation, a quality I've also too often lacked. My father, non-plussed himself, once brought him a wind-up clock to which he'd lost the key, for example, and Don sat for a long spell with a ball peen hammer, a flat file and one brass screw until in time he fashioned something workable, as it still is these decades later.

  A fellow could cry, I thought. But how in the first place had a fellow gotten here from a tumult of animal sign in snow? He'd certainly taken no unswerving path. The mystery wasn't so deep, though, since my mind is never a model of efficiency. Far from it. Yes, there are certain places and people to which it seems almost automatically and directly to go if I leave it alone, as I try to do on these treks, but then it'll be off to who-can-say. If I've proved anything in these pages, that would be it.

  There were also living people who called to me as I read the drama of grouse and fisher. Next week, my brother-in-law would have yet another test for cancer. The doctors would check his brain for tumors, as if the colon variety hadn't been enough, and the lung surgery to excise its migratory cells. This was a man I loved like blood family.

  Oh, there seemed enough worry to hold me and others, for sure. His mother, a lovely, valiant woman, a living mockery of every stupid mother-in law-joke ever uttered, had fallen the day before out in Colorado. She'd been staying with her youngest of four daughters, happily the one who's a nurse. The tumble caused a mild concussion, but diagnostics revealed something worse: a spine so compromised by osteoporosis as to make it almost indistinguishable from the surrounding soft tissue.

  This was a woman who'd been vigorous enough ten years before to hike and paddle with people considerably her junior.

  Slightly more than a decade younger myself, I was still able to snowshoe through these two feet of powder and hump my considerable frame along for most of a day after bird dogs, sound enough to wade a fairly bossy trout stream. I was nonetheless subject—for all my denials and exertions—to the same penalties of time as she. Whom would I be fooling to think otherwise?

  I wondered as so often what mulish aspect of my nature forced me to give myself little sermons reminding me of my good fortune. A better man and saner would of course have looked at my in-laws' health problems from a better and saner perspective: my wife's brother had barely breached age fifty, and he was where he was. I knew he'd have given all his teeth to be in my snowshoes instead. My mother-in-law would have been gratified by a quarter hour of what I had in amplitude.

  And yet the hike I'd planned, up and over Barnet Knoll, then down to an overgrown twitch road to the west, felt just slightly more like a plod now, with that old demon what's the use my understated companion, so many of my dearest friends and relatives gone or threatened, and I in what had to be acknowledged as the home stretch.

  This hiking was hard. Someone of my bulk, snowshoes or no, must posthole it through such deep powder, and—again, no matter my denials— I couldn't do that as I pushed seventy even as well as I did pushing sixty. I suddenly felt a tart anger at that, but an equal one at my own improvidence.

  In autumn, I'd gone to the Internet, as best a techno-Neanderthal could manage, to find a set of longer trail 'shoes than any locally available ones. I needed them for just such a day as this. My three-footers weren't giving me the flotation I needed, and my incipiently stenotic lower back kept complaining about the matter. I'd marked down several brands and designs, any of which would have served me better than what I wore, but I hadn't followed through. Maybe something in me recoiled from mixing cyberspace with the space I'd travel on foot. But now I vowed to see to things that very afternoon, as of course I did not.

  When I finally crested Barnet Knoll, I shut down my petty maundering and bitching for a bit to marvel again at wild sign: there were scores of deer cuffings in the red oak stand there. As always, I felt awed and humbled by the life force of the untamed creatures. What skill and avidity went into finding and digging up those acorns! Every day, the whitetails need to find some way to make it through, to discover adequate nourishment. And so do their stalkers.

  Evergreen tips around a frozen vernal pool near the mast grove had been trimmed as high as the deer could stand on hind legs. Out on the flat of the pool itself, a pileated woodpecker had showered a pile of square-wrought chips from a moribund hemlock. They flashed like sequins, even beneath a somewhat overcast sky.

  A little farther on, the softwoods grew higher and their tops mingled more densely, and whether or not I found them, I knew the tiny golden-crowned kinglets would be busy there, flitting from one tree to another, looking among the shingled cones for enough larvae and grubs, three times their body weight, to see them through another day and night.

  All this did chasten me, though too mildly. I didn't really know, and never had, what struggle was, at least in its elemental shape, having been so lucky a man in my family, my work as a teacher, my friends and my health. And yet as I reflected on these doings I kept coming back against my will to a notion of animate existence as a persistent scuffle, and ultimately, ineluctably, a losing one.

  To go looking for the kinglets, which I had been blessed to see ten or a dozen times, another token of my enviable fortune, struck me less as motive for the time being than habit.

  To ratify the pessimistic view, I needed no more than twenty further paces to come across another story in snow: a winter-killed, young-of-the-year deer, everything gone but a patch or two of hide, a single thigh bone, half a spine, and a lower jaw with teeth ripped out. What little the coyotes left had been finished off by ravens and rodents.

  The previous night's light snow had sugared all the trees, bough, branch, and bole. Now another shower was floating down. To shove through the thick growth ahead, I figured, would be to dislodge powder from above with every step. Since, bald though I am, I seldom wear a hat, soon enough I'd be feeling the cold stuff direct. I almost short-circuited the hike, but instead, perhaps more in debt to the habitual than even I realized, I cinched my jacket collar tighter, still inwardly whining about one more small misery to endure.

  Misery? Endure? Good God.

  Thank heaven, the realistic view kept diluting my unmerited self-pity. I'd too often heard fellow higher-academics protest how difficult their lives and work were, and as often silently thought they might try cleaning road kill from a Mississippi highway in summer, say, or tending the lavatories in a hospital for the criminally insane, or simply teaching public high school. And yet here I'd just been grouching that, in my utter leisure, I would have to face a bath or two of clean snow. For all of that, some perverse and inexcusable part of me kept leaning toward a darker account. It tugged at me like a horse at its tether.

  There were fairly open woods on the western sidehill before I reached the grander woods. It was midday now, and to my south a winter sun, the color of a Eucharist wafer, faintly glimmered through cloud cover. I had to concede that the cascade of flakes across its face looked lovely.

  Thus distracted, I shoulder-brushed a skinny fir, which, prematurely, unexpectedly, did drop a feathery spill onto head and neck. I c
ursed by instinct, then right away beheld how the finer flakes hovered around me, almost like an aura, that pale sun seeping through it. A net of stars.

  And in that instant my region's genius sprang to mind:

  Dust of Snow

  The way a crow

  Shook down on me

  The dust of snow

  From a hemlock tree

  Has given my heart

  A change of mood

  And saved some part

  Of a day I had rued.

  Unlike Robert Frost, I hadn't heard or seen a crow, but even if I myself had been the one to shake down snowdust, my day—which, yes, had gone slightly rueful—abruptly turned. It was as though I saw, instantly and thoroughly, my life in its full privilege.

  The shimmering torrent seemed a magical powder, mixed by figures from old fairy tale to induce visions of peace and rest. I could have sworn I heard a voice (my own? a breeze's? some god's?) preaching calm.

  As so often, a moment also summoned, in a throng, all manner of others like it. It brought back that morning on the flank of Kenyon Hill, just above our yellow house, when my son—now thirty-nine and twice a father himself—touched the back of my neck from his riding pack in a way so delicate it brought on tears. He was only two, and just this side of sleep, but I still feel the fuzzy tip of a mitten stroking a place just under my left ear. I stopped then and stood, gazing at the house through an identical scrim of snow, and felt the sort of peace that comes on a person, if he is lucky, more than once in a lifetime.

  It had come on me, I saw, more often than I could reckon, unearned.

  To recall that boy on my back was to drift on to each of his four siblings, my oldest daughter thanking me for removing my own mittens, reaching up to clasp her hands, gone cold enough to pain her. Miraculously, she told me, "I love your fingers; they're always nice and warm." I had doubts about my own inner warmth, my perseverant adolescent demons still rampant, and even uglier ones lying in wait down the trail. But from this other trail, an identical snow zigzagging ever so softly through the treetops below what locals called The Hedgehog Den, they were blessedly absent.