Blood on the snow

I woke up all sorts of lazy and dull. They were back from their walk, these two grad students. One worked for me years ago as an undergrad, lived here for a summer of flying squirrels. She’s a mom now and the other a mom-to-be in a few months. Here at Kemp Natural Resources Station. Here in God’s country, according to the old beer ads.

“We were out doing wildlife forensics” they said, now back by the fireplace.

We retreat north each year for a Saturday morning outreach event to showcase the lab’s research. The students were particularly on-point this morning, describing their research with panache, fielding guest questions with good humor. It was fun. Normally, we’d ski on Saturday afternoon, but the Northwoods has had little snow this winter. The trails never opened.

Luck of the draw, this year’s crew were the most senior, for the most part a dissertation away from being Dr. So-and-so, having passed the other landmarks we require. Several were out working up a nearby research plot. The two went for a walk. I took a nap, making an excuse for my sore knee. My doctor thinks it’s a torn meniscus.

They said they found an unusual blood pattern in the snow on the station’s little nature trail.

Reading blood in the snow is very nearly a disciplinary imperative although it’s imprecise. Blood means predator activity. Our conspecifics have an unfortunate tendency for imagining malevolence as companion to the reality of killing and eating other species. Biologists tune themselves to imagine ecological dramas.

The pattern in the snow was entirely of tiny droplets, nearly an aerosol, concentrated in a fan pattern in the middle, extending in both directions sparsely along the nature trail eventually giving out under the hemlocks to the north and in the hardwoods back where the trail crossed the driveway.

I followed the blood because it followed the nature trail and I had little enthusiasm for stepping my tender knee over the off-trail deadfalls. I laced up my boots and bundled up to salvage a bit of the late afternoon sun. To show them that I’m not as lazy as I felt. To assure myself. Hard-frozen forest soil nearly slipped under my uncertain boot on the slopes, something not quite ice exactly, but slick with a dusting of fine snow. I moved slowly.

Without killing and eating mice there would be no owls; without eating cottontails in your backyard no foxes or Cooper’s hawks; without eating deer, no wolves; without zebras pulled down, no lions and so on and on.

We teach detachment, even if inadvertently. But eventually an enlightened veil of sorts slips, we pull from something connected, something informed by empathy but also astute to the great ancient complexity. It’s bigger than all that, cycling nutrients, shaping forests, driving natural selection, creating nodes in the textbook food webs — sometime raising the residual hairs on the napes of the naked apes that stop for a coffee on the way up north. Sometimes a blessed prompt for the imagination.

I met my two best field biologists in the hemlocks because they were out puzzling too. These two, like the others and despite their relative youth, had been poking around in the woods for decades – only lately getting (sort-of) paid for it. “Maybe a funny tissue-tear associated with antler-casting…” suggested the deer-nerdiest of the two, noting that the blood seemed to follow deer tracks. “Lots of small canid prints…” offered the other. The moms speculated about a raptor grabbing a red squirrel.

They left in the direction I had come, and I had the delicious opportunity of puzzling out the tracks of my students while they were puzzling out the layered mysteries of fine bloody droplets and tracks of all sorts of winter-active players.

I was studying the behavior of my expert students, knowing them and imagining their thoughts. It’s no mystery why we find animal tracks where we like to walk (and build our nature trails). It’s all about efficiency, being careful with the hard-won energy we’ve sequestered. This is especially true during winter when the cold saps your body heat and you kick through the snow. Ever notice how deer drag their feet in the snow? They kind of need to. They’re finding the compromise between precious effort and forward progress towards their next mouthful.

The puzzlers are intellectual kin, you know. These curious souls, following their imaginations through the snow-dusted woods. This is where we start, and we return our whole lives.

Hemlocks have dense overstories that block sun from hitting the forest floor. No sun means no understory. On the dark hemlock hillside, the trail intersected a collection of recent deer beds. Exquisite in the way the deer bodies melted the thin snow into the very outline of their recumbency, legs folded under them. They’re here for hemlock sheltering. That crusty ice there? That’s the hollow between the rib cage and the folded front leg where the snow only melted partially. Here in the dark hemlocks, the casual Saturday snow-prints of grad students puzzling out the same stories. Here in the growing darkness, a wounded-knee fifty-something Michigan kid puzzling out the puzzlers – and finding deep satisfactions.

It’s nearly cliché to see gothic cathedrals in the dark hemlocks. The open understory space follows the dark massive trunks ramrod straight to the canopy-occluded sky where light breaks through on the edges and wind churns the tops in stately rhythms. If you’ve seen stone vaults filtered through stained-glass shadows, you’ll know. Cathedrals were designed to draw your attention (and your soul) skyward, where God was, and the angels.

I missed my Ash Wednesday service this week, walking the freshmen among the ghosts of the hill-prairie back home. The conservancy burned the prairies, and I tried a bit to put the ashy pieces together and spin the allusions into something significant. Sometimes it works. Might’ve gotten a blog post out of it.

We poor creatures, consigned to living in two dimensions while tempted by our ability to gaze deeply into a third. Is it any wonder we put our God in the sky? Beyond reach but accessible with enough imagination, with mounting up with wings like eagles. Why should we climb the hill prairies and watch the wind churn in the hemlock tops? I’ll miss church again tomorrow, when we pack up and head back. But I’ve got hemlocks for the moment.

I’ve been avoiding Lent. Maybe less deliberately so, but I can muster little enthusiasm for it, and I am too lazy to force myself. I remarked to a colleague, himself a Christian environmental scientist, that living in a time of climate crisis was like a perpetual Lent. But I won’t live to see the payoff, if, indeed, there is one to come. I worry for my kids and now my students’ kids. He said he returns to that metaphor in his own teaching, and I worry about whether it fits really, or (more ominously) not.

But a little bloody mystery in the snow, at the same time a familiar drama and unknowable. It’ll disappear in an instant, in the blink of an eye when the weather shifts. We pull from something connected, something informed by faith but also astute to the great ancient complexity. A walk in the snowy woods, the dark hemlocks and the wind-burnished lakeshore. These good people and their energy, their company for a retreat weekend and walleye cheeks at the supper club, and their native puzzling. It’s redemptive or as close as I’m apt to get at the moment.