Excerpt from the Book
I chose a Friday in April to spend my first night in the cabin. There was still no roof cover, and the walls remained unsheathed. In other words, it was a frame, open to the weather. I drove up from Boston, arrived an hour before dark and spread my sleeping bag on the deck. I heard a commotion of splashing on the pond below. It sounded like slap, splash—slap, splash—slap, splash! I had to have a look.
I walked down the path to the pond and saw one Canada goose madly chasing another. Neither was fully lifting from the water—they were sort of running and flapping over the surface, one clearly in pursuit of the other. The splashes looked like machine-gun fire hitting the water. I was witnessing two males in combat over an unseen female. In the mating season, a female goose selects the male based on his ability to protect her, and what was probably occurring in front of me was a powerful male demonstrating his prowess to a keenly observing female. Once geese are paired, the mating is an elaborate ballet.
It begins with the male and female facing each other, undulating their long necks and making soft goose sounds, which is like dry wood being dragged gently over slate. It is a sound that seems to contain both effort and pleasure. When the moment comes for the act of mating, they go off by themselves, at night and on the water, in a kind of private tryst. The male and female extend their necks horizontally to the water, dipping their beaks. The female spreads her wings over the surface of the water and slightly submerges. Upon completion of copulation, the female bathes herself with the male watching, and then the male bathes himself as she observes. The watery ruckus unfolding in front of me was a prelude to the courtship and promised that I would have fluffy goslings in the pond in another month.
I still had time before dark, and it was too early to crawl into the sleeping bag, so I walked down Adams Road and turned down Cold Brook, following it downstream. I came to a beaver pond that I had been unaware of. It had been created by a mud dam that held back a small tributary to the brook. A couple of swallows swooped over the water, picking insects out of the air, and then I saw a beaver making his way across the pond, only his big head breaking through the surface. He spotted me and gave me the angry slap. He went down and did not come back up. I waited quietly. I walked a little farther to an open place near the brook and listened. This seemed to be a perfect place to hear woodcock whistling. It was the time of year for their courtship display of high flights and sudden twisting drops, but I heard nothing except the sweet melody of the peepers, which was its own reward. It is among the brightest and most cheerful sounds of the woods.
The sun was setting now, so I headed back. I reached the big pond, and the sun’s rays lit the trees along the far shore and sent a red glow over the water’s still surface. Once again, I witnessed that incredible bowl of light—this time as it was rapidly losing its luminescence, like a gas lamp that has been shut but whose glow takes a few seconds to extinguish.
I returned to the cabin, taking my time along the way to examine the hillside. I arranged my sleeping bag and slipped into it. The deck was hard, but at least it was flat and without rocks as there would have been had I been sleeping on the ground. I was using my son Adam’s sleeping bag, a fancy mummy bag from L.L.Bean. It had a little hood that rolled up into a small pillow. The peepers were singing loudly, and occasionally I felt a cool puff of damp spring air come up from below when the wind lifted. The air smelled of the wet thawing ground and the new season. Somewhere off in the distance I heard an owl’s windy nine-syllable hoot: Whoo cooks for you, whoo cooks for you all?
The stars shone brightly in the sky, and I watched them through the crossbeams of the cabin frame. It was as if I were looking through the rigging of a sailing ship, maybe a coastwise schooner making its way down the Atlantic shore. I folded my hands behind my head and stared upward. Another gentle damp breeze blew across the deck, and I imagined my cabin lifting into the sky like some heavenly gaff-rigged raft, ascending into the night sky toward the stars, tacking toward Polaris and then hauling south and west toward Orion and bright Betelgeuse, and eastward for a closer look at the planet Saturn, and silently, behind a big spinnaker full of moonlight, sailing home again. I fell asleep to the sound of the geese gabbing away in the pond, here on Earth.
