Learning To Listen

     They stood still, alert as hunters on prey, in the light tracks they’d rustled through dry autumn-brown-and -gold field grass grown back, since it’s second cutting, to be tall enough again to brush the bottoms of their chests. The air was that spectral kind we get in Northern New England in the brief twilight of a late Fall afternoon when every object seems magnified and in crisp, clear contrast to everything else for the briefest moment before the sun sets, casting a bright, wood-amber-like glow over everything just before giving way to the onrush of lengthening nighttime shadows.

     It was that moment, too, in the ebbing warmth of every year up here that tells all creatures (if they listen) that the sharp, white fanged death of Winter is suddenly on the breeze. ‘T’weren’t there five minutes ago, that frigid chill vein in the wind, and the smells it suddenly brings with it of the much farther, greater, colder North, but here it is now, like a bony hand extending from a specter’s shroud-wrapped sleeve in a Dickensian nightmare, pointing accusingly at the living, wailing and moaning through the pipe organ of every leaf-stripped, barren tree, 

     ”I am Death. I have come. Seek shelter from me… … or die!”

      Nostril-flared noses pointed high to that faint wind. Two sets of eyes looked inward – not out at the deepening night – but backward at the unerring knowledge of an instinctual, merciless ancestral past… of days before the pact with man, without his promise of secure shelter, of food at the ready, and the warmth of fire.

      “I feel it, too, dogs,” I said softly, hushed and as rock still as the big German Shepherd on either side of me in the sudden presence of such awesome, primordial power.

       Our days of freely roaming the open land were done ’til Spring, now… thoughts fleeing in checklist worry to other things, like cords of wood stacked neat and dry, the well-planned labor of earlier, Summer days.

      “Let’s go home”.

       And three turned as one, silently treading homeward… … a bit closer abreast… … than we had, coming out. 

(@ Eliot Freeman, November 23, 2009, Hanover, New Hampshire)