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Saturday, January 29, 2005 |
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On walkabout... Back, and all scented and perfumed from the walk among resinous plants. We all smell like sagebrush and juniper now, and the house seems warmer for our exertions outdoors, and smells better with us back in it. I wish we had some gnarled old cottonwoods near here. I suspect they were here before the owner built, and used his 'dozer and backhoe on the ponds, because the distance where the creek passes through this property is the only gap in the creekside phalanxes of cottonwoods.
Sound bites: other than the creek's constant background burble and the panting of my dogs chasing one another through the brush, the only sound came from a pair of distant blackbilled magpies. They have a cry only a little more musical than the squawk of a jay, like ripping taffeta, with a question mark on the end. I've been feeding them the skins and cores of apples I make butter from. They get very excited about fruit this time of year. |
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I have a lot to do here at feral today. I'll have to stop mid-morning to take a walk... but I'll finish what I can here before I go, and I'll bring home pictures for you. There was some excitement recently across the road from my old farm in Surprise Valley. Ardith the Egg Lady, who lives across the blacktop from my old place, had been losing hens and ducks over recent weeks, but she's kind of used to that happening from time to time from coyotes and the like. Then one day last weekend she went out to feed her poultry and surprised a mountain lion in the act. It was standing right in front of her with a chicken in its mouth. She was so shocked and didn't know what to do but stand still and wonder whether she could fend it off with her cane (Ardith is 77 and has had a knee replaced). Her husband happened to be outside working and he saw what was happening from a distance, raised a commotion, and the lion ran off. They summoned the county "trapper" (hunter) and he brought a helper. They shot the lion on the next place to the north, the property of my friends Doug and Melissa, artists who have the tortoise and the dog and the spiders and the 2-year-old daughter. Melissa, a photographer, ran down and photographed the dead lion and examined every inch of its body, even the inside of its mouth. She has a wonderful curiosity about all things. I wondered whether it was My Lion, the just-weaned male who killed a bullet-wounded deer in the dry creekbed thirty feet from my front door two years ago. I didn't let the trapper kill it then and it stayed on in my woods. I found a new deer carcass in there about every other month. But Melissa said no, this was a young female. It's usually the young ones who get into trouble. They're so hungry, and it makes them stupid. *** Cold front came in yesterday. High winds, a little graupel in the afternoon. Yesterday's brown hillsides are dusted with snow this morning. But the sun is showing through the receding snowclouds, and we have a dry, cool week ahead, says the weather service.
I don't know whether I'll ever get used to the sound the wind makes in these junipers. Bared deciduous trees have lovely, high, soft voices, and the basso profundo of pine trees is incomparable, operatic. But when the only trees anywhere around are junipers a very strange thing happens when the wind comes up. These are rigid, rigid trees. It takes a high wind to move any part of them. And when it does, the resulting sound is mechanical. I've noted before how machine-like it can be, like distant earth-moving equipment. And I do think the vibration is communicated to the soil and sort of rumbles in the ground. As I was falling asleep last night it struck me how much it sounds like wind through the cables of a suspension bridge. That's a clue, I think. |
