Crisscross
In the space of a single storm, the trails put on their winter coat. The texture, color, and mood of the paths I covered dozens of times during the summer had changed.
Familiarity has a way of narrowing the field of vision. So it was with a new openness that I actually saw the path in front of me and it didn’t take long to find evidence I wasn’t the only person out that snowy night. The sounds rumbling from the nearby highway already made that clear, but it’s easy to slip into the solitude of dark. Particularly when normally bustling trails are fresh and silent.
Before I saw the tracks, it felt like nothing more than me and the sagebrush and the flakes and the stars. But the delicate little deer footprints in the snow reminded me otherwise. That deer and I crossed paths, she with her dainty feet, me with my clunkier ones, at around seven o’clock on a Friday night with just enough windchill to know how far I was from home.
I’ve crossed paths with animals before - I’ve seen the squirrels and lizards, heard all the birds, had a few snakes slither along, eeek-ed at a moose ahead, watched a porcupine lumber across the pine loam. Certainly, countless more creatures have intersected my path unknown and unseen.
But the winter lets those happenstances come to light. It shows both footsteps and the way from which they came. The quiet evidence remains until covered or blown and tells the story of how long ago the path was made; that night, the rate of snowfall meant the deer had made its marks within the hour.
Winter’s often seen as a season of dormancy but in this case it highlighted where we humans weave together with the wildlife: right across my path, right through the trail. The snow – the thing that makes everything harder to survive - intimates that connection in the clearest way.
Not to say that winter is benevolent – of all the seasons, it is the least. But snow also acts as an insulator. Perhaps not in a way our warm bodies can recognize, but in the gentle way a tree’s root can take comfort in a degree or two of difference.
As I continued down the trail, each footstep squeaked with the reminder that this much-anticipated winter had actually arrived. I wondered what the deer thought of it, her feet certainly not squeaking and her coat capturing flakes as she wandered. Looking for a spot to bed down and have the snow pile further on her coat and her lashes.
That night, the deer and I moved in perpendicular directions but for that small square of earth where our feet met in time and in space.
Maybe with a hint of wonder, for both of us, at the start of the next season.
Inspired by events in Round Valley, Park City, Utah.