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158 At the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in south-central New Mexico, the sandhill cranes are not yet awake. It’s early February, barely dawn, and a brightening sky throws pewter light over the pond in front of me, its surface rough with ice. Backed by cottonwoods and distant hills, the far side of the pond is still deep in twilight, but I can hear snow geese there, conversing among themselves with a nasal chatter. In the middle of the pond, I can see dark silhouettes against the pale sheen of the ice: the silent rounded humps that are sleeping cranes. The stark form of a cottonwood snag juts out of the pond near them. The angular lines of its upper branches are sketched in deepest black against the opalescent sky; a dark oval on one branch will resolve into a bald eagle as the illumination increases. The frost on the boards of the observation deck presses its chill up through the bottoms of my boots, and I think of the birds on the pond, standing barelegged in the icy water. The cranes winter here as they have for generations. In a few weeks, they will begin to fly north toward the Canadian A Day with Nothing More Urgent than This a day with nothing more urgent than this 159 plains to breed. They will fly through my home state of Colorado , stopping in fields and wetlands to rest along the way. A few years ago, Doug and I went to see the migrating cranes at a refuge in the San Luis Valley, near Colorado’s southern border. At the edge of a field where grain had been cut and left as forage, we watched the big smoke-colored sandhills fly in for the night. Gliding down with hollow cries, the cranes would alight with a few bouncing steps, and then straighten. Long-necked and long-legged, they arranged the distinctive flounce of feathers at their rear with a few shakes and stalked the ground with deliberate steps, an endearing mix of gawkiness and grace. The field where my husband and I stood watching was just a couple of miles from a major east-west highway that I traveled uncountable times growing up. Going to visit my grandparents or riding along with my father on business trips, that road had been, I thought, drained of all novelty. Yet here I was, in my thirties, watching a spectacle I had never seen before. I don’t know for sure why we never stopped, but I suspect it was mostly the lack of time: to be on the road with my father at the wheel was to be caught up in his singular goal of getting where he was going, as fast as possible. • • • Today, at the urging of a friend, I’ve made time for the cranes. Lisa stands nearby, her Houston-adapted blood gelid in this air, when something startles the geese. There is a whir that grows into the roar of thousands of wings in motion . The birds’ cries are layered over the thunderous wingbeats , a shrieking, honking cacophony. The flock ascends, a blur of white flowing toward us out of the gloom. The noise is terrific, a blast of feathers and voices. The geese circle over our heads and then settle again. In front of us, the sandhills’ heads are still tucked beneath a day with nothing more urgent than this 160 their wings; they seem oblivious to the racket. The sun is not yet up, but I can now see them through my binoculars: white frost has settled on their gray backs. They stand in small pools of open water, the skim of ice held at bay by the heat of their bodies or their slight movements in the night. They will take their time waking. When the sun is fully up, they will straighten their lanky necks to reveal the red crowns on their heads. They will preen and call to one another in their comic voices. The geese will burst off the pond all at once, departing for the grain fields in a flurry of noise, their white and black wings creating a scintillating cloud. The cranes will leave gradually, taking off singly or in pairs or in family groups of five or eight or four. The birds, slipping on the ice as they take off, will be awkward for a moment but then will settle into the easy rhythm of their slow...

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