The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass

up the icy driveway, a band of seven elk crosses in front of me, six cows and a one-antlered bull, like golden horses in the blue foggy gloom and mist. They pass from right to left, heading down farther into the woods, and I turn to the right and begin backtracking them, trying to find where the bull might have shed his mahogany-colored antler, like some great burdensome sword or scimitar laid down in the snow, with the war finally over.

MARCH
    A T NO POINT of the year are we more incorporated into the seasons, more completely owned by the world, and the woods. Summer and autumn, and even the first holidays of winter, are traditionally the seasons we think of as most easily summoning the joy of the human condition; and yet in February, March, and April, the Slog-O-Matic mud season, the long brown night of the soul, never are we quite so owned by the beautiful world. Beaten down, made malleable as if by the accruing weight of the ivory snow itself, we become tempered to the very shape of the land itself, and by its rhythms and processes, as surely as if we were buried by that snow and lay pressed flat against the darkened ground, our bellies spooned against each curve and hummock of soil, each swell of stone, and the snow above pressing down, kneading and pressing and sculpting us physically, while at the same time impressing upon us somehow some deeper, unspoken counsel of rhythm and pace.
    On the surface, there's very little difference; in fact, the sameness seems to be spreading, as the snow—which initially mimicked the sleeping shapes of every humped and curved and buried thing—becomes deeper, smoother, more homogenous.
    But down below, things are moving, being reshaped by the mounting pressure, even if only a tiny bit each day. The bears and frogs are sleeping, letting the season pass on by, largely undisturbed by its slow but powerful dynamics, and the songbirds, and so many others, have fled south, likewise disengaged from the snow's incremental but forceful grip. But for those of us who remain, whether buried by the snow or shrugging off each day's mantle, we are always emerging, changed and sculpted a little more each day. The valley owns us as surely as it owns any of its rocks or rivers, forests or fields, or any of its other animals.
    Everything still seems the same, in March. But beneath the snow, and within our blood, there are stirrings that tell us that the land too is stirring.
    The stems and branches of the willows have begun to glow yellow—seeming incandescent, particularly in the falling snow, with the willows the only color on the landscape, so that the eye is drawn to them, mesmerized, almost with the intensity or focus of one in need of rescue or salvation, physical or otherwise. They burn there, at the far edge of the snowy marsh, glowing and waiting, unchanging, it seems, against the same joyless gray sky: a dendritic spread of color looking like our own veins and arteries, which—we can only hope—are filling likewise with that same gold light.
    Nothing else is different, and yet for (perhaps) the first time, you sense the movements. Change—dramatic change, the kind our species is better at noticing, and paying brief attention to—seems closer now, if even only through the gap or difference between the two words
February
and
March,
one long and backward-moving, the other shorter, brisker, and more forward-moving: as if the force of our nouns can be almost enough to help nudge a thing into motion—as is said to be the case, sometimes, with even our dreams, and their bold summons of a thing much wished for, much desired.
    Our little nouns,
February
and
March,
as plaintive against the gray sky as the faint cries of the birds that are no longer here, and yet their own part of the world, helping—along with all else—to ease along and urge along the chain of the seasons.
    In March, it would be hard to say whether one is witnessing the end of winter, the beginning