Trail Time – New Early Spring
It is getting near the time when it will be ice out on all the lakes of the Gunflint Trail. Some lakes are already wide open — the deeper ones are still locked in but the ice is spongy and falling apart. Today it is sunny and very still. It’s the warmest and quietest that it’s been for a while in this new early spring. The wind blew and blew for days — it roared at times, a bass note sounding like kettle drums under the constant rushing of the wind through the pines. Boom!
A different kind of booming is coming from the woods lately: the grouse are drumming again, with that sound that is like your own heartbeat but speeding up to a frenzied crescendo.
Lars and I have been gazing at the sky a lot. It is such great theater. Last week two Trumpeter swans flew over, heading toward Gunflint Lake. One evening, a cold fog poured down out of the woods, filling up the basin of the lake from west to east, obliterating the far shore, mist curling up to the sky.
Our lake still has ice on it. A lead opened up this week where there had been a foot-high ridge of ice for the last few months of winter. In the rosy dawn today, the waterlogged ice was dull and blue, but that narrow expanse of water between ice sheets reflected the color of the pink sky: a shiny river of pink in a field of blue.
We’re seeing lots of moose tracks and signs of their browsing. I had fun one morning following those big tracks — where I lost them, I could see the willow stems showing green where tree moose had bitten off the tips. Lars found a young slender birch tree that had been broken and pulled over so the moose could reach the tender buds. There is one mountain ash tree that I’ve watched for over ten years. That bush tries so hard to grow but every spring it gets nearly all its new buds nipped off. The base of the beleaguered tree is growing fatter each year, but it hasn’t gained any height, topping off at about four feet, only to get nipped down again the next spring.
A pine marten appeared outside our window as we had lunch one day. She peeped her head over a small hill, eying the bird feeder, and climbed up a birch tree. It looked like she was scoping out the best way to get to the feeder. She looked up at the branches above, then checked out the line the feeder is hanging from. In one athletic and graceful swoop, she jumped to the ground, bounced up, grabbed the edge of the bird feeder with her front paws, then swung up like a gymnast, perfectly balanced on the feeder. She poked her nose where the seeds should be, and finding none, looked around, spotted something, rocketed to a nearby boulder wall, then headed up the hill with something small and gray in her mouth. It took me much longer to tell you about it than it took her to do it. She was like some expert wilderness parkour racer. It was so amazing to watch. Although she was a beautiful mover, the animal looked a bit bedraggled. She looked hungry to me — the fur was wet and untidy. But it is an awkward time of year for animal pelts and coats, with the winter coat shedding off and new spring coats growing in. The moose sure have an awkward time of it and will look pretty shaggy with bare patches for a while.
Last night I stayed out late on the porch, bundled up in a long winter coat — it got down to 18 degrees later. The robins were singing their evening aria to the sun setting in sherbet-colored western skies while dark clouds grew in the north. The barred owl began calling from the other side of the lake — where he was the sun had already set, yet we were on the same lake. I looked up in time to see a bald eagle rising from the lake, fish in claws! Ripples showed where it had struck — in one small hole in the ice. Black and white and majestic against the dark blue of the late spring ice, the bird rose as its wings pushed and pushed against the air.
The moose munching its way through the woods, the pine marten arrowing in on its prey, the eagle grabbing a fish dinner. While the grouse drums out a rhythm, everything is speeding up to summer’s quickened pace.
