It is still summer, despite overnight temperatures hovering at 43 degrees Fahrenheit. I have seen chevrons of Canadian Geese, flying high, in chevrons of seventeen. In one chevron, one wing of three flew higher than the two main wings, and I mistook them at first for much smaller geese. I took a walk in a woodlot between the land of four farmers, walking on a road allowed to return to nature. I believe the road right-of-way still exists on the county books. In other words, the county has not evacuated the claim of that road upon that linear strip of land. If so, quite feasibly, a walking path could be cleared. It would make an exceptional walking trail but it would cut down on the freedom of hunting. I counted three stands along that forgotten road. Trees toppled across the old roadway gave me a clue to look for a stand. Trees toppled cleared the killing fields, allowing arrows or lead to fly freely to the deer's heart. The walk to the swamp and the lake shore had guard towers, ready to collect a harvest of venison. I have nothing against hunting, especially when Michigan's sizable deer population could suffer a winter famine if the snows fell too deeply. Yet, I am amused by how enterprisingly the farmers harvest the deer herd, buying additional licenses or donating humane kills to food kitchens. It's not my weapon of choice, and hunting deer for me is involuntary. My autos have scored more than one kill. I wish I had a tractor beam or a laser beam to move Bambi or Filene a little over to the right or left. Stop them from entering the flow of traffic. I hear one can install a deer whistle on a truck hood and scare them away. If they worked, I would see them on every vehicle in Antrim and Burns Township.
My childhood friend, the owner of a big tract of five hundred acres, built his house close to the lake, on the final ridge before a twenty foot drop to the swamp, the lake level. He married a good wife who took in her elderly grandfather. She set him in an open window and steadied a rifle, allowing that grandfather to take a final stag. I have no idea if the recoil knocked him down: I heard this story third hand from my mother.
To assist in the draining of one farmers field, allowing water to flow to Euler Lake, a trench had been cut across the road. I wanted to walk as far as the collapsed bridge, and an enterprising man had filled gaps in the bridge with cut willow logs. Willow won't burn as firewood. It's amazing how an old willow will continue to grow as the trunk rots from within. I can imagine how the writer of a fairy tale could imagine a soul inside an old willow. I can think of four willows close to my mother's farm that have collapsing trunks , feeding tender wickers, yet rotting with exposed wood innards, reminding one of brown, friable earth. I am sure one could plant a tree in this medium. I heard shooting close to home and shooting far away carried on the silent cold and uninterrupted atmosphere. Sounds travel father when there's no buildings of note to baffle sounds. I had no idea what animal season had begun Labor Day Weekend. Still, I wanted a walk in the woods, refusing to allow hunters close the woods to my wish to gather with my eyes. I know most of these hunters, and if I startled a buck and sent him running, I am sure I would eventually hear of my buck blocking. Of course, I am no worse than the boy running circuits out to the woodlot and back, riding fast along the two tracks on a dirt bike. Later in the day, an ambulance came to bring his sister to the surgeon's care, thrown off her four wheeler. I should have known those paths to be a little too rough for inexperienced riders, but these were a neighbor's children, and who was I to scold them. I couldn't scold them unless they slowed down or stopped to talk to me. I heard about the accident from my brother, who had paid his visit to my mother after I had driven west.
I gave up before I reached Barnes Road. Walking over fallen trunks and under thriving briars had stressed me, and I was stomping in the woods in penny loafers, no socks. It's a miracle that my ankles don't itch with poison ivy. It didn't bother my father either.
I noticed strange fungi on three sides of an ancient oak trunk, an oak still showing signs of thriving. All three examples reminded me of brains, convoluted and lobed, looking salted with paprika popcorn salt. I saw a few leopard frogs hoping in the tall grass when the road passed the cattail marsh. This is a good sign that the watershed had less pollutants than some. No purple loosestrife in this bank of cattails. I though of testing my reflexes and eyes by trying to catch one, but why spoil a frog's day? A neighboring boy from another farm family taught me how to catch frogs for bait, the leopard frog the perfect size, slender and long, for the maw of an attacking bass. Every frog was a bass caught. The trick is to hold ones hands far apart and then swoop in from left and right, hands clapping together with the frog legs in between.This must take advantage of a blind spot of those bulging, bubble eyes. I never had to use a spear or net to catch frogs for bait.
Along this trail, in May 1968, my mother took her four children for nature walks, out in the spring to see puffballs and snowdrops, may apples and fresh deer tracks. Never a sign of trilliums.. Plentiful skunkweed.
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