This Ain’t Walden

“Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste to the sky as well as the earth!”

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Halcyon, Revisited

It wasn’t long ago that the hillsides seemed afire and I missed fish after fish, standing slack-jawed in awe, bathed in radiant light.

… teach a man to fish, …

A crash in the woods, way up on the hill, grabbed my attention one recent dew-drenched late summer morning. I stood still, listening intently, trying to determine its source, and heard a whole series of crashes coming down the slope in my direction. Zeroing in on the sound, I saw movement in the tree tops as whatever it was shook them from below. It was coming closer and growing more violent and I was mystified at first as to what it could be.

A thousand pound moose is capable of moving through dense woods stealthily, with nary the snapping of a twig, but even the clumsiest Bullwinkle, with antlers five feet across, was more likely to be down in the swamps and beaver ponds than busting its way through the trees up on the dry hillside.

A big black bear can raise quite a ruckus as it rolls rocks and tears into downed logs in search of ants … 

… and a bear can sure shake a tree as it climbs, but as this crashing and shaking drew nearer I heard another sound that eliminated even the largest bruin as the source of the commotion. Completely out of context, this new sound confused me at first and I had to dig deep into my not inconsiderable mental stash of woodland lore to understand what I was hearing.