Overgrown Fenceline

I’m a believer in experiential learning. Even truths which are rather obvious when common sense is applied sink home more comprehensively when they are revealed through lived events. So, upon setting out to follow the otter tracks of yesterday, I was reminded of several things:

1. Otters are much lower to the ground than people, and can easily pass through spaces a grown man may find difficult to follow. They are also light, and when walking across frozen water will not necessarily break through the surface;

2. When walking in a mixed area of marsh and woods where the ground is covered with a smooth layer of icy snow, a clear path through brush may in fact be a channel of water. You can never be quite sure;

3. Sometimes it appears that animals may also be following you, or at least following along in the footprints you left behind in the snow days ago, even when they deviate from any obvious path;

4. Animals get up to all sorts of things we never know about. A single otter that has left tracks across a field and headed off into the woods has probably been all over, back and forth and around and around, criss-crossing all sorts of places. Squirrels and snowshoe hares and mice and voles and coyote and deer and mink are also quite busy when no people are around to watch. Yet, from a window that field might look empty, even in the moonlight;

5. Everyone has a territory they feel comfortable in, and just like animals grow wary when they approach human habitation, humans may feel wary when they sense they are leaving behind the comfort of their inhabited spaces and entering places that, by custom if nothing else, belong to wild animals;

6. Such places can be surprisingly close to where people live;

7. Coming across signs of past human activity in such places is both exciting and creepy.