October

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Autumn, October

by Charles W. Schwartz

It is October in Wisconsin and Aldo Leopold turns to the subject of the fall hunt. I have to admit that I have only been hunting once in my life and that was because I was doing a story for a daily newspaper on a hunting club.

They tried to fool this Girl Scout into thinking that golden raisins were deer scat, but I knew better. Once they realized I (my husband who was photographing the story had hunting experience) wasn’t a nature novice, I was treated with more respect and had a wonderful time. And I never told them that I was secretly pleased that no deer died by our hands that weekend.

But in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold reminisces about hunting for grouse and pheasants:

“There are two kinds of hunting:” he begins, “ordinary hunting and ruffed-grouse hunting.

“There are two place to hunt grouse: ordinary places, and Adams County.

“There are two times to hunt in Adams: ordinary times, and when the tamaracks are smoky gold.”

Smoky gold tamaracks

“The tamaracks change from green to yellow when the first frosts have brought woodcock, fox sparrows, and juncos out of the north,” he writes. “Troops of robins are stripping the last white berries from the dogwood thickets, leaving the empty stems as a pink haze against the hill. The creekside alders have shed their leaves, exposing here and there an eyeful of holly. Brambles are aglow, lighting your footsteps grouseward.”

Musing on an abandoned farm that he passes, Leopold becomes aware that his dog has  been “pointing patiently these many minutes.”

“I walk up,” he writes, “apologizing for my inattention. Up twitters a woodcock, batlike, his salmon breast soaked in October sun. Thus goes the hunt.”

Leopold then reflects on early risers, what he says is a “habitual vice in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains.”

by Charles W. Schwartz

“Some hunters acquire it from geese,” he continues, “and some coffee pots from hunters. It is strange that of all the multitude of creatures who must rise in the morning at some time, only these few should have discovered the most pleasant and least useful time for doing it.”

“Early risers,” he writes later, “feel at ease with each other, perhaps because, unlike those who sleep late, they are given to understatement of their own achievements. Orion [the constellation], the most widely traveled, says literally nothing. The coffee pot, from its first soft gurgle, underclaims the virtues of what simmers within. The owl, in his trisyllabic commentary, plays down the story of the night’s murders. The goose on the bar, rising briefly to a point of order in some inaudible anserine debate, lets fall no hint that he speaks with the authority of all the far hills and the sea.

“The freight, I admit, is hardly reticent about his own importance, yet even he has a kind of modesty: his eye is single to his own noisy business, and he never comes roaring into somebody else’s camp. I feel a deep security in this single-mindedness of freight trains.”

by Charles W. Schwartz

“One way to hunt partridge,” Leopold notes, “is to make a plan, based on logic and probabilities, of the terrain to be hunted. This will take you over ground where the birds ought to be.

“Another way is to wander, quite aimlessly, from one red lantern to another. This will likely take you where the birds actually are. The lanterns are blackberry leaves, red in October sun.”

Guess which is Leopold’s preferred method.

“Red lanterns,” he continues, “have lighted my way on many a pleasant hunt in many a region, but I think that blackberries must first have learned how to glow in the sand counties of central Wisconsin.”

The red lanterns of fall . . .

“At sunset on the last day of the grouse season,” Leopold concludes, “every blackberry blows out his light. I do not understand how a mere bush can thus be infallibly informed about the Wisconsin statutes, nor have I ever gone back the next day to find out. For the ensuing eleven months the lanterns glow only in recollection. I sometimes think that the other months were constituted mainly as a fitting interlude between Octobers, and I suspect that dogs, and perhaps grouse, share the same view.”

March

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, photography

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is spring,” Aldo Leopold begins his chapter on March in A Sand County Almanac.

Canada geese by Charles W. Schwartz

While ruminating on the yearly patterns of geese, Leopold wonders, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his [awareness] is soon a pile of feathers.”

In warmer climes, one can find Canada geese year-round, but in Leopold’s Wisconsin, they appeared only twice yearly to proclaim the arrival of two seasons–winter and spring.

“November geese are aware that every marsh and pond bristles from dawn till dark with hopeful guns, ” he writes. March geese, on the other hand, are a different story.

“They wind the oxbows of the river, cutting low over the now gunless points and islands, and gabbling to each sandbar as to a long lost friend.”

Later, Leopold writes, “Once the first geese are in, they honk a clamorous invitation to each migrating flock, and in a few days the marsh is full of them. On our farm we measure the amplitude of our spring by two yardsticks: the number of pines planted, and the number of geese that stop. Our record is 642 geese counted in on 11 April 1946.”

Leopold later discovers that “goose flocks are families, or aggregations of families, and lone geese in spring are probably just what our fond imaginings had first suggested. They are bereaved survivors of the winter’s shooting, searching in vain for their kin.”

Our daughter, at 11 months, visiting with the geese.

Canada geese were very much a part of our life when we lived on Dews Pond near Calhoun, Georgia. They often nested in our yard and that of our neighbor, and we would look forward to the time when the goslings would emerge from the eggs. They became so tame that they would eat from our hands, and we would spend hours watching their antics. To this day, the honk of a goose brings back fond memories.

In Savannah, March sees the blossoming of our daffodils and crocuses.

And the loquats that were beginning to ripen in January are finally edible.