First day of hunting season. I waken to a hot crrr-ack in the subject at dawn. It is the same hot shot of split wood. In its echo, the same sad promise of winter fuel.
It is not my husband. He won't take anything with eyelashes anymore. I sit up in bed and believe about this poacher, so lazy or maybe desperate for his charge that he has to sit illegally in my meadow in the dark, quite possibly in my driveway in the ease of his truck.
Maybe he can't support the hunt, not unlike my husband. Just needs to give his family. I am not angry at this person. It is too complicated to be angry about the reasons for which one creature kills another.
It has been a stunning October, with sapphire skies everyday, like it thinks it's August. The trees have interpreted their time, basking in their toward-dormancy-dance. The river birch first, and then the aspen and alder, and now larch needles fall in fair-haired rains. I have my two-year-old son down the stairs every morning, fling open the doorway and say, "Thank you," to the day.And he says, "Tenk yoo," and we cut the plague of stink bugs and cluster flies clinging to our house, betting their lives on the precise opposite of this moment.
This dawn I add to our thanks, "It smells like snow."
"Snow?" He doesn't remember.
Inside I get coffee and mind to NPR. It's supposed to be 65 and sunny today. Same tomorrow. I shrug at my want of sixth sense, and overcompensate by fashioning the best cappuccino this side of the Rough Mountains. At least I can mean so.
Later, I am walking in the woods, despite the hunters. I assert that it smells like snow. I wish to fire the reds and golds into my winter mind, which I live will go gray by February. I want to seal into it, the hope of spring; that the cold months might be good of honest work. I pluck up handfuls of larch needles and give them over me the way I used to the oak seeds of my Midwestern youth, helicoptering through the air. The needles sift through smoky ozone from burn piles and wood stoves and down in my hair and I give them there. I possess to have friends with winter. ***
It's the first sauna of the season ended in Coon Hollow at my friends' house. They make them most Sundays once the weather turns. Open house. Potluck. Take off your dress and pass through the cold night in bathrobes holding lanterns. Go in to the octagonal cedar house with eucalyptus so hard your nose feels singed, take a place on the top level if you dare, or acclimate on the lower stratum in the corner. Avoid the huge ticking wood stove with your bare body and recognize the dim faces, flickering beards and hippie smiles in the lantern light. Push yourself to sweat it out. Lie slack-legged on a towel and do whatsoever you need with your eyes.
Modesty has no point here. You'd believe it would get political but it rarely does. Mostly it's mouth around a pie auction at the Grange Hall or the second country ski conditions up toward Blacktail, or did you see about the two women who got lost out for a ski and exhausted the dark in a snow cave until their husbands found them the following morning - sang songs all dark to maintain their minds off the cold.
These are not people who are stressful to try anything to anyone; not even themselves. Maybe at first. But by now it is who they are, how they do things. These are people who wish to keep their heads screwed on directly by holding their fingers off buttons. They hate buttons. One of their daughters once said to me, "I know our outhouse - you don't get to flush." They receive no running water, all wood burning heat, no indoor plumbing, no electricity - which means no TV, of course, and almost of the time, they don't eat meat.
Their son has a pet magpie that he rescued from the nest after its father was killed by a raven, and he can lash your ass at any board back and embarrass you with his very practical and somewhat mystical reason of the way nearly everything works. Their daughter has read every Harry Potter book three times and loves her room because it has a canopy bed that she made out of birch snags and old tie-dye sheets. The father makes soft instrument cases and the mother is a blacksmith. They rise and wheel and canoe all summer and ski and ski and ski all winter. I have never left their home once without a bag of something they have grown in their garden or made in their oven.There is nothing this family can't do. And so I fancy I might ask them what they think: does it look like snow to them?
The sauna is hot and about of us go out to the floor to sit steaming and bare in director's chairs. Some are braver and rinse off in a cold-water-filled claw foot tub a few feet away. We hear whoops from them and I sit back while the rest talk snow.
One says, "It's a small early, don't you think." This is not a question.
Another: "Oh, I remember snow on the land on Halloween many years. And that's in what - five days?"
Still another: "I guess we however hold about time yet."
And another: "We better. I'm not through with my wood pile."
"But does it feeling like snow to anyone?" I peep. Afraid I am going to discover the face of me that has been pushing buttons all my life. I get a lot of maybe sounds.Err, mmm, eehh.It's like I have asked a hunter where he bagged his buck.
Group consensus: "Doesn't matter - it'll come either way. Whether you feel it or not." They laugh, knowingly. I smell small and controlling - trying to take such a matter as winter.
So it's stake in the sauna for those who can tolerate it. I have the top level. I wish to bake everything out of me. The death of autumn. The months without roses and soft earth. The trail rides over and the fishing reduced to auger holes in places where I can't help feeling no man is alleged to stand. No strawberry stains on my children's fingers. No wash up for dinner and seeing swirling dirt in the kitchen sink from an afternoon spent building fairy houses in the woods. No end-of-the-day dips in any amount of lakes, coming up absolutely new. No loons flying over in the morning. No birds waking me up at all. I'll bear to search for the birds.Feed them my pittance of sunflower seeds that sometimes woo them too far into my window panes so that they drop and freeze before they can become un-stunned.
I can do it through New Years, I think, stalwart in the Bahamian heat. I can probably work it through Valentine's Day. But I am frightened of the rest. Less than 75 years of sun in the Flathead Valley per year. And we have been hogs this October. ***
The following morning, before I give my eyes, I see a head in my mind from a dream child. I do not love her, but she feels like mine.
"When will it snow?" she asks.
"I don't know," I say.
"Yes you do," she says.
"Soon, then," I say. "Very soon."
And I give my eyes, and the domain is white.
Laura Munson is the source of the bestselling memoir "This Is Not the Account You Consider It Is" (Amy Einhorn/Putnam). This piece previously appeared on These Here Hills.
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