Who goes there?

Things are melting around Muskoka. It is very lovely.

The massive trees, roots upturned, punctuate the lowlands. Topped with a layer of snow, it is easy to see where the wind has lifted and toppled them over.

The rivers carry meltwater into the lakes.

"Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and “the dead months” will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest."
-   Fiona Macleod, Where the Forest Murmurs

Quiet walks, through the green bowers of pines will cease when the bugs arrive again!

"There is a privacy about winter which no other season gives you … Only in winter…can you have longer,
quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."
-   Ruth Stout,  How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

by: Robert Frost (1874-1963)

WO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow
to keep an appointment with a beech-tree,
or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
-  Henry David Thoreau,  1817 - 1862




Soon, the snow, and the evidence of creatures unseen, will disappear.
I have no idea what these tracks are. (But now I do, thanks to several photogalleries!) Something round, dragged through the snow, landing with two paws beside each other.

UPDATE: Wayne, my friend and former N. Ontario teacher, tells me these are otter tracks! What a hoot! Here is more photographic evidence. I think of the Disney movies of otters frolicking on hills.

I've seen the muskrat around here. We were sitting at the lakeshore, and at edge of the ice floe (the shore was about 3' open) and it popped its little head up!

Life is a mystery.

They are everywhere in the deep peace of the forest.  

"Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white;
And reigns the winter's pregnant silence still;
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill,
And willow stems grow daily red and bright.
These are days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year's ill,
And prayer to purify the new year's will."
-  Helen Hunt Jackson