Mist and fog season return

 

It is October, so today is cooler than yesterday. I change over from cotton flannel in greens and blues to wool knits in reds and greens. It’s warmer today than it will be tomorrow

It’s mist and fog season. Early in the darker morning I go out with Foxy, who is still wetting the dog bed, to relieve us both, and the fog droplets sparkle and hover and shift in the beam of my headlamp. Everything is quiet because the dampness dampens the sound. Everything is wet. The fish-cleaning bench and dog houses and straw in the dog yard, and Lucy’s grave. The red and white clover is growing green and thriving on Lucy’s grave.

I have had my nose to the earth, the earthy, chilling, dark ground under the mists, in the Octobers of my life. And one constant has been the thick, thriving, green witch grass: ‘Elymus repens’ (“creeping, crawling millet”), a.k.a. couch or quack grass. When the other grasses and sedges have flowered in August and gone to seed in September, diminished and browned and waned pale, witch grass is leafy and thick in the meadows and open places, along rows, along logs and cement blocks and stone paths and fences.

Once when I was a boy, we had pegged the local wood ducks’ night roosting pothole (less than an acre) and the day roosting pond (about 3 acres) pegged, and they were a simple hop (400 yards) from the one to the other.

So, in the early darkness in the morning my buddy Burger – big like his name and always game – and I set about to waylay the ducks at first flight when they got up from the night roost and hopped over to the day feeding pond. We crawled on all fours for a quarter-mile in the dark so as not to spook the ducks and I was young then and I knew every clod and bale and gopher mound in that wide wet field with witch grass coming in green and thick. It was cold and wet on the witch grass for a quarter mile and that was the 12 gauge very new then and oily still in parts. In the dark we came to a high barbed-wire fence line along a tractor track and sat back in the wet witch grass.

But when first light came it was October and there was a fog so the wood ducks in squadrons came and came and it was difficult to see and we kept missing at point blank, but it wasn’t so much that it was foggy or dim light as their trajectories were so low and they started to flare and scatter so we never hit a thing. In a minute it was ended, and we sat looking at each other unbelieving at what sportsman call at once luck and unluck, and the next morning we crawled the same fields to get to that spot, but those wood ducks had taken flight for good from us. For good. Isn’t that the truth?There was a great prairie basin that I spent my days in and on the clearest days you could see acrossed it, from the oak landing up this side at the corner of a cornfield, down and straight across to the oaks up beyond the…let’s see… second or third far cornfield, just under the plateau. I figured if I could time myself, it would take me 15 minutes hump from one side of the basin to the other, sort of up and down swales and around a pothole, with my trapper’s basket on.

But in October the mists would come, and I remember them as warm because I always had my pack basket on, and always my heavy 12 gauge, and sometimes a handful of muskrats which I recommend carrying by a hind leg above the joint because their naked, slick tails can tend to slip away. I felt very safe under the low sky within the fog or amidst the mists in that basin.

Then out in the field under the cover of the fog I’d kneel on the witch grass sod and set a baited fox set.

But the next day was November 1st, and so it was very cold, and although I went out in the morning and the sky was very high and crisp and clear overhead, the frost hadn’t burned off the dew yet in the basin, so way out there in the crisp white and green of the frozen witch grass, was the orange shape of a crouched red fox – ‘Vulpes vulpes’ – trying to hide – for everyone to see.