Tracks and trails - here alongside, and on, the Rio Grande.
Alone, I wander up the trail, a path of sorts no more than a game route, steep and vague and secret, complete with logs to jump and branches to duck under. During the summer, I ride my horses here, in warmer days, days now so far away. Then, as now, I know I will pass no one. In the summer, of course, such solitude is not easy to come by. Such solitude is cherished, soothing; it consoles the soul then as it does now.
Now my snowshoes fall lightly along the trail of tracks I have set before, following my own footsteps, silently tracing a course I know so well, an intimate path, a thread to follow securely in the disorder of the mountain. My breath is louder than the sound of the steps. I breathe with the mountain, the air, the snow. I touch with my poles the different layers of storms, a powdery soft layer on top, then a slight change of texture and a bit of resistance and I feel the snow of the earlier storm. The mountain reveals her past in subtle layers.
Up the aspen hillside I slowly wind, taking coverage in the silvery smooth bark and branches, grateful for the lack of leaves which allow the sunlight to filter through onto my back, now so warm as I work through the bare trees. I stop to rest. I startle a solitary red tail hawk who spies me only a moment before I spy him. He flies low through the trees, silent except for the brush of his wings on the aspen, an odd sound I would have missed has I not been still and listening.
Out in the open, at last to the top of the hill, I rest again. The elk have been bedded down here, leaving in their wake large pits in the snow, sunken down to the pressed brown grasses, cradles where they have spent the morning resting after a feed, no longer seeking the shelter of the black timber to avoid the heat, avoid the humans. The hill above their beds is marked with tracks of their earlier meandering and pawing at the tall grasses beneath the snow. It will not always be so easy. The elk know. Every day they are a little lower down the mountain, heading towards lower ground.
Crossing the wide open meadow is a challenge today. Three moose used my packed trail yesterday. Why they must follow my tracks, a mindless following perhaps as paths laid out before us can be. They with their long strides and wide foot prints punching deep into the snow with each step of their spindly legs. I struggle to smooth out the bumpy trail they have left behind with each step of my lowly snow shoes. It is not easy, my footing is unsteady.
In such stillness, one notices the slightest of movements, of changes. A coyote walks with ease in the snow on a hillside about ¼ mile away. He sees me too. He stops, and sits and watches me. Yes, he is sitting. I imagine he is amused to see me struggle so in the snow. I am reminded to laugh at myself. I learn it is easier for me to set a new track in the fresh snow to the side of the trail upon which the moose have travelled
I return to the trees, to another obscure trail down the mountain, making my way back to the ranch. It is travelled by many now, more so than in summer when perhaps it is but me and my horse taking this route. Now I see signs of the coyote, lynx, snowshoe hare, rabbit, squirrel, elk, moose, all following or crossing the same path, the same trail. We keep our distance from one another. There is plenty of room. We need not crowd, need not invade the solitary nature essential for survive up here.
I consider the difference between observing nature in the wild – and observing wildlife in the backyard. Because we have infringed. Encroached. Sprawled.
Trespasser, they call me, these wild beasts in a wild land where they belong, and I am in their world. They slip into the shadows of the trees, and wait but a moment while I pass. The world is theirs again.