Do Not Go Gentle

It has been a cold winter, with much more snow than we have become accustomed to. But it had not been one of our coldest nights. In the morning the snow was fresh and white. My eyes, narrowing against the brightness of the day, immediately were drawn to a glistening refuge of black. As I walked down the stairs my brain struggled to assemble the darkness into meaning. It was not until I was almost upon it that its form became understandable. I saw the cold glittering eye, the hairlike feathers gathered at the base of its beak. The crow's wings were not fully extended, but rather crooked, as if it were in mid dive and the force of rushing air was too great to permit complete extension. It was only

as I squatted beside it and saw the still,

half-clutch of its feet that I knew for certain it was dead.

I looked up into the Spruce above us, trying to imagine the bird's last perch. There was no branch that looked more likely than another. Each would have given protection against the snow. I wondered if it had spent a cold solitary night, without the comforting pressure of a companion, or if only in its falling was it single. I felt very alone, there, squatted next to a dead bird in the middle of a city. Although my wife was only moments behind me and cars hissed by on the boulevard, it seemed isolation was the only realistic sentiment. Still, I didn't move, I stayed to gaze at the metallic sheen of crow feathers, and to note the dull black of its lizard feet. Its eyes seemed yet to mimic the shimmering, mirror-like quality they held in life. Looking up again at the tree and then down, at the bird with its wings half spread, its breast cradled in the snow; I realized that the last action of its life had been flight.

Twenty minutes later I pulled into the parking lot at work. One pair of bootprints preceded mine to the front door. Alongside them, clearly marked on the fresh snow of the sidewalk, was the straightline track of a red fox. I knelt down again, noting how the fox had almost exactly superimposed the print of its hind foot onto its front, leaving the impression that it too, needed only two feet to navigate the streets of the city. I looked around at our neighborhood, its grey industrial shoulders covered by a mantle of snow. A truck rushed by.

Smiling, at the frozen reminders of a fox and a bird.