2.20.13 One Fine Morning The Bears Are Giving Birth

With sleep eyes you stumble to the back door, open it, and lean out to greet the day.... brisk and cold and a snappy wind to boot, the conservation field covered with an array of Coyote and Fox and occasional Weasel tracks,  early morning clouds racing by, enormous, like huge Star Wars Ships, moving their  massive shapes through the neighborhood, silently, over head.

Squinting still, with pink homemade booties on, you bring the old dog out the front door to pee, tip toeing quickly over to deliver the contents of containers  to lavish berries and nuts and seeds upon the picnic table by the broad living room window, to toss upon the shrinking snow and spread beneath the suets and seed/nut/suets and feeders all, as one lone Chickadee admonishes the slow pace of breakfast delivery, the two black squirrels racing away even as you reassure them, the four greys leaping from tree to tree high above in the lanky aged Maples, with you thinking that at least the 20 Morning Doves, motionless in the Sassafras Tree, will have a first go at the breakfast spread til the squirrels regain either  courage or  appetite  enough to slink back and fill their furred bellies with their delicate hands.

 The families of Downy Woodpecker, Cardinal, ubiquitous Blue Jay sibs, the Titmouse en famille, the Juncos, the tiny yellow Finch family attending to their thistle bell, the Nuthatch parent and child chiding the others as they dart in and out for their own selections, the Flicker cautiously arriving at the suet offerings with their spectacular coloration and great trepidation, all descend and grouse at the four indoor cheeping cats, lined  on arms of living room chairs, at times coming head-to-head, nose-to-nose with the utter frustration of the eagerly dining squirrels.

The occasional Red Tail Hawk comes by the neighborhood , doing the late February getting-kind-of-hungry-waiting-for-the-lagging-behind-Dove dance, at times with luck, so that when I walk by, home from work, there will be an inevitable pile of small soft grey feathers…not often, but at times, the great Hawk dines here also.

All the while,  the neighborhood Coyotes are off in their nearby winter homes, the not-yet-dinner themselves Possum and Skunk and Porcupine coming nightly to the Compost Diner Site.

In the midst of this, we know, as we fall asleep in our warm beds and wake to the cold dawn, that the Bears are giving birth. They are giving birth while deeply asleep in their hibernation, and the miracle of tiny wet young are pushed out into a freezing cold winter land ,as were their parents and their parents and their parents, to blindly move toward a teat, to nestle into the pungent, warm, slumbering bulk of their mother, to feed and feed, and soon discover each other and play and tossle while still she sleeps...to push far beneath her bulk on a freezing cold morning, press beneath her thick fur when in comes a freezing rain, to suckle and grow and bumble about .

Until one fine morning, as the light upon the earth and the heavens shifts, as the Maples begin to waken and their sap thins and flows, as trees all about hear the differentiation of temperature and humidity and light and begin to slowly come awake, on possibly this very fine morning, her enormous eyes open, her body begins to stir, and there are her offspring...possibly one, or two, at times three, surrounding her, bonded as tree is to earth; imagine her gaze, her nostrils filling with the smells of her own young, their wobbly funny small bodies delighted with her wakened presence, possibly their confusion when, enormous, she rises, licks them each, stretches after her  long winter's sleep, and begins to think about lunch.