Essays After Eighty (15 page)

There are new animals, now that the trees are back. Migrating from the west, coyotes howl all night and remain invisible. I never saw a wild turkey when I was young, walking with my grandfather. I saw my first in the 1980s. I was walking Gus when we saw a gray-feathered gobbler cross New Canada Road. Gus stood stock-still in amazement—so did I—as the turkey passed in front of us with its head bobbing. Within a year I saw in a patch of grass a gathering of twenty-five or thirty.

Deer have declined in number, although they ate my petunias last summer. Thirty-five years ago, an old orchard bloomed down the road across from a burned-out farm. Deer ate the small, wizened apples, which made the orchard handy for hunters. My uncle Everett shot a buck every year and provided deer meat for our freezer. (Never confuse deer meat, which is delicious and gamy, with a restaurant's tasteless venison.) By this time the Whittemores' orchard has disappeared under softwood. A state trooper bought the land to raise Christmas trees but never got around to it. Fewer deer, fewer hunters. My grandfather's cow pasture has grown into woods, and bear have replaced deer. Carole made bear stew. Sometimes I see an actual bear, but more often I see their scat, and when I kept a birdfeeder in the maple out front, I found a smashed birdfeeder each spring. After we had been here fifteen years, the forest increasing around us, Jane walked Gus up New Canada Road, where he treed a bear cub. If its dam had been nearby, it might have been the end of Gus, if not of Jane. Twenty years later, sometimes I see a moose, which no one saw when the land was farmed. One summer a big moose and a smaller one—I assumed a familial relationship—crossed Route 4 every morning at six, walking east from Ragged Mountain to drink from Eagle Pond. They walked with dignity under their elegant antlers, as new and as old as the returning eagle.

D
ONALD
H
ALL
, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, awarded by the president. He lives in New Hampshire.