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.
