The ground is soft and crunchy under my boots. Melting snow pockets each step.
A flock of mallards, at least a dozen, lift from the pond. They fly honking over us as we cross the Gulley Bridge into the woods.
The dogs have their noses to the ground. Even I smell it. Musky scents, like low clouds, awakened by the wet warmth.
The dogs gobble deer pellets and piss on coyote scat. They run ahead, they hang back smelling stories I’ll never know.
Zinnia rolls in something black and sticky, now she smells like the woods too.
Then they are gone.
Too busy to answer my calls, I find them chewing on the carcass of a hunters deer, no longer frozen in the snow.
Up the steep hill, widened and deeply rutted by last years logging. We come to place of broken trees. Zinnia runs, barking at a red jeep with Connecticut plates abandoned on the logging road.
The woods have changed since I started walking them.
Only a narrow swath was logged, but it is unavoidable and cuts the woods in two. I understand the logging, but the red jeep feels disrespectful to me.
We turn towards home.
I stop to hug the giant maple with the three arms, big as trees themselves, reaching up to the sky. Grateful the loggers left her standing.
Back in the woods behind the farm, I say hello to the old Shag Bark Hickory, walk in the circle of oaks and stop at the little waterfall to watch the shadows under the ice.
Fate disappears again, blending into the spotty snow and wet-black tree trunks.
But this time I know where she’s going.
By the time Zinnia and I get back to the farm, she’ll have slipped under the gate and will be waiting for us in the back pasture, patiently watching the sheep.
