OXBOW MEANDER

Often on impulse, I walk out by myself:
Magnificent scenes, I alone know;
Walk to the source of the stream
And sit down to watch clouds rise.

—Wang Wei

THE SUN is so low at this hour that it is all but impossible to look to the west, and I trail a long shadow as I make my way to the oxbow meander. Wood turtles at times take the last low sun of the year along its west-facing bank before entering the stream for their long overwintering. As I descend to the brook I see that a large red maple in the floodplain swamp has gone down, a casualty of yesterday's windstorm. This enormous windthrow obliges the deer to take another route among the ferns. And so it obliges me, as I borrow their new trail, a replacement of the former well-worn path that led me quietly and fairly easily to a ford in the stream. The tree's great tipped-up roothold has left a crater that seems destined to become flooded next spring, forming a vernal pool that may well be appropriated by wood frogs and spotted salamanders for their breeding.

The last warm days of autumn draw me to this place at the fading light of late afternoon in the evening of the year as does the breaking forth of spring, with its dazzling new light in the morning of the year. As fall moves on toward winter and the leaves begin to thin, the low shafts of light that are allowed to touch the stream and its banks become a deeply evocative testimonial to the turning of the year. Everything they touch is graced by a near-miracle radiance in the immediate landscape. The water is low and completely still, as it generally is at this time of year. The brook rests. The wild surges of March around the oxbow bend have been forgotten. Or remembered only, I see, in the swirls of grass and sedge and drifts of flood wrack, interwoven strewings of branches, stems, leaves, and vines that perfectly trace the course and mark the height of the flood that swept through the shrub thickets of the higher bank. In this artful-seeming arrangement of the wreckage of spring spates, as if the brook had left them here for the purpose, the wood turtles do their final sun worshipping of the year.

And here I find a turtle who has been doing just that. A young one has evidently been settled here for a while; several red maple leaves, let loose in the still air to spiral down from the high canopy, have landed on his carapace and stayed there, obscuring him all the more. The shadow from the high bank across the stream has crept over him as well. But the air is warmer than the water, and it appears that he will linger on the bank before returning to the stream, which, though only thirty-seven degrees, will be warmer than the air when the temperature falls below freezing in the night.

I find no other turtles—significantly, no adults—in this place that for so many years has yielded me many of my final sightings of the year. This could well be a reflection of the toll taken by the otter predation of last winter. I have unprecedented and unwelcome tallies among my notes for this season: I have, by way of four shells I found after discovering that first lifeless wood turtle at thaw, documented five fatalities. I know the seasonal movement patterns of at least half a dozen adults whom I would have expected to encounter this season but have not. And in addition to the known dead and those I have failed to come upon, who could well have succumbed to otter attacks, I have recorded upward of thirty turtles who have lost from half a leg to one or two entire legs.

And yet, in an alder- and meadowsweet-thicketed stream reach a quarter of a mile downstream from the confluence of two brooks, the unusually populous wood-turtle center on which I have focused, I found four intact individuals, perfect to the tips of their tails. Because this site is in active farmland, I rarely go there. But I wanted to compare its wood-turtle status with that of the area of heavy impact. I cannot count this as a definitive survey, but I certainly have to consider that the predation may have been quite localized.

And perhaps episodic as well, if considered as an outbreak set in at least several decades of minimal predation. (Many of the adult turtles I have recorded were more than twenty years old when I began to observe this colony.) Space and time are clearly factors—I would say critical factors—in the coexistence of wood turtles and otters over millennia, an ongoing dynamic with so many variables and interactions and a complexity that may well be ultimately indecipherable.

Seeing, which I found so difficult upon my arrival, becomes nearly impossible as I follow a turn in the brook and face into the sun. Except in the shadows of the trees I am absolutely blinded. I see better after the sun drops below a ridge of white pines to the west. Then, as light begins to slip away altogether and I make my way from the brook, I gather pale kindling in the pine grove, smooth fallen branches from which all bark has sloughed. As I leave, as darkness deepens in the riparian landscape, a mood deepens in me of days growing shorter and the year ending. These transitions color me, as they have since my first boyhood wanderings, with a vague melancholy, even as they tinge the leaves of the streamside maples with an exuberant brilliance. I think back to a time long past when other brooks, now lost, ran wild, and I followed. Night comes on with its first small scattering of stars, and I forget what it was I was trying not to remember.