Writing on Water

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Constellation, 2004, instant color prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment. © 2004, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Reproduced courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, from “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.”

In mid-February, I come upon two sets of fox prints, trotting in parallel across a wide creek near my home. Though both are small, one measures slightly larger, probably the male. It’s likely at this time of year that the female is already pregnant and that they’ve established a den somewhere nearby. Within a couple of months they’ll have kits, and by the end of summer they’ll all have scattered to live solitary lives until next January or so. But for now these two move together, unhurriedly, on the lookout for mice or rabbits or a careless bird. The story of their year has only begun, and as I stand over it, on the ice and snow in the middle of the frozen creek, I am struck most by its simplicity. Hunting for food, heading toward shelter, patrolling territory, the endlessly repetitive, largely uneventful rounds of a life. Animals in the wild are either profoundly interesting or profoundly dull, depending on your perspective. I happen to hold both views, which is perhaps why I so much enjoy reading tracks. They are spots of time, fragments of lives, ephemeral but resonant in the delightful manner of a short story or poem, available only until the next snowfall, or until the spring melt turns them to water and rushes them away downstream.

So I pay attention and stay put for a while, trying to notice everything I can. Just around the next bend I find the characteristic bounding pattern of a river otter, two footprints side by side, then a lengthy space, then two footprints side by side, and so on, along one stretch of the creek ice. All of the weasel family move like this, and there has been some decaying of the tracks since the animal passed this way, but the size of the stride and of the feet makes me reasonably certain it’s an otter. A heron was here too, perhaps looking for a fishing hole. And I see a loping, dog-like set of prints, too large for a fox, too small for a wolf. Maybe it really was just a dog, from one of the houses at the edge of this county forest. Maybe a coyote. The prints are old and indistinct, so I can’t guess with any confidence. But I like the process. Walking out here in the middle of the creek, my tracks mingling with the others, I try to fill in the gaps of the stories before me. Where were they going? Where had they come from? What were they doing?

If you gaze about you in a snow-muffled forest, your strongest impression is of peace, calm, stasis. Except for the occasional chuckle of a woodpecker or the monotonous call of a chickadee, nothing much seems to be happening. And this is largely true; nothing much is happening. But it was. For if you look to the ground when you’re in the woods, at all those intersecting, wayward tracks, the impression is of almost antic activity. Rabbits, squirrels, mice, deer, weasels, foxes, birds. Well-trodden trails or fresh single tracks. It’s as if I’m seeing all of these animals at the same time, in the present, like travelers in a giant train station, all crossing each others’ paths, heading off in various directions, living their separate lives, foraging for food and water, killing, dying, eating, defecating, together, alone. These stories in a quiet wood can be a little overwhelming. They are loud and bustling and often hard to read. At the same time, however, they are wispy and unreal, for the animals I “see” exist only as traces of the past, of the already gone, unsubstantial as ghosts.

Unlike the other animals in my life, all the household...