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Settled in the Wild

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Chapter One

I leave a window open on April nights and put my pillow close to that cold slice of air because I want to hear spring come back to this small clearing. Sometimes it snows and I hear that soft muffled falling, or it sleets and I hear instead the sharp tick of ice against the glass. But mostly the sounds are new.

One night a flock of Canada geese flew north under the half-moon. I woke to their bugling from the south and listened as the birds crossed over the roof, close enough to catch the sound of their wings like a bow drawn back and forth across the bass strings of a cello. Maybe ten geese. Maybe fifteen. An uneasy silence followed as if the thrust of their heraldic flight had upset the air behind them, as if they had broken through the glaze of winter above my house and trailed spring's upheaval and promise.

After midnight, a porcupine climbed into the weeping willow by the frog pond and started to snip off the young branches, tender and crisp with new leaves and swelling buds. I heard one branch, then another, slip through the branches below them and land on the ground with an almost inaudible sigh. Lying under a pile of quilts, I counted the falling branches. When I got to five, I forced myself up in the dark, turned on the kitchen light, and stepped outside. The light sparkled on the frosted grass beneath the tree. I was barefoot, wearing an old T-shirt. Another branch dropped as I walked in the dark to the driveway, picked up a handful of stones, and pitched them in the direction of the tree. They bounced off the trunk, splashing into the frog pond through paper-thin ice.

In the moonlight I could see the dark blob of porcupine against the sky. It was pressing itself against the trunk, about twenty-five feet up, like a big irregular fruit stuck in the branches. I tossed a few more stones.

"That's for eating my tree!" I said.

Back in bed, as clearly as if the porcupine were answering the force of my assault, I heard another branch drop.

An hour or so later, a loon flew over. It filled the night with one long cry. What the voice said was that the ice is starting to melt off the nearby lakes, almost enough to give loons the open water they need. What the voice said was that it could hardly wait.

Just before dawn, a raccoon, perhaps the first to rise from its restless winter sleep, began to sort through the shed. I must have left the door ajar. I listened as it tossed aside what was probably a wine bottle out of the recycling bin. Then the empty plastic compost bucket rolled across the shed floor. Then something heavy dropped. I wasn't sure. Maybe one of my son's old winter boots that I wear around the yard, now that he's grown up and gone.

Everything in that cold predawn was exquisitely quiet except for this one raccoon, the only soul in the universe making noise.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Settled in the Wild by Susan Hand Shetterly Copyright © 2010 by Susan Hand Shetterly. Excerpted by permission.
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