Heard something in distress out back tonight and went to find it. Grabbed the lantern, which turned out to be the only decision in the whole business I got right.
It was a call I know the shape of — the same one my chicks make when they get separated from the hen, that rising insistent thing that doesn’t stop. But it wasn’t a chick and it wasn’t any bird I’ve heard out here. Not a cat. Definitely not a dog. It was up in a tree and I never saw it, just stood underneath in the dark working through the list of what it wasn’t and getting nowhere.
Then something moved behind me, maybe a hundred feet back, crunching through the leaf litter and not being quiet about it. So I said out loud toward the tree, keep calling to your mama, you’re doing great, keep calling — and I walked back. Briskly. George met me with a third of the way left to go and I looked up past him and saw the amber flicker off the mudroom lantern and that was that.
Night before, a porcupine walked up to me at the firepit and nosed around a couple feet away, bored, entirely unbothered, and wandered off. So the woods are not consistent about what they hand you.
I still don’t know what it was. Whatever was crunching behind me was probably a deer — they sound like something four times their size in dry leaves and everybody guesses the distance short. And the thing in the tree may well have been fine, may well have had its mother forty feet away waiting for me to leave, which I did.