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Refuge
The Big River waits, cool, rested, swelling from the frequent rains as its smaller brothers come up over their banks, feeling their seasonal oats, and the refuge quickens in the first faint, warm breezes of spring. No rest for the shad as the keen-eyed eagles make to retire once more to the north, handing off the baton to countless flocks of pelicans. Black edges on white wings, wheeling, diving, feasting, they drive the survivors into the greening backwaters, the haunt of the lanky heron, that inscrutable, patient assassin, blending in, halting, stalking, tag-teaming on wetlands luncheon dates with his cousins, the egrets in their starched white formal wear. Gliding, trumpeting, graceful sandhill cranes descend on the marsh to join others brooding on their low nests, red eyes bright, striking against plumes of grey-brown; their bass notes echo with the honks of the Canada geese in free-metered counterpoint to the symphony of coots, shovellers, buffleheads, mallards, wood ducks, canvasbacks, and teals, all splashing and congregating in the reedy, muddy shallows. Look twice at the water’s edge, and under the thicket green herons lurk, intent, surveying their surroundings with the same gastronomical purpose as the sooty cormorants, those aerial torpedoes of the avian world, preferring speed to stealth when on the hunt. Beaver and muskrat chortle and splash in the tall grass, foraging, and turning their humble lodges into marvels of natural architecture. Painted and mud turtles, less ambitious, haul out briefly onto choice logs, biding their time until the prime basking season of high summer, and they can luxuriate beneath the blazing mid-day sun, serene, steady, constant, like the Muddy, itself, as it rolls along, and along, and ever along.
—D. W. McMillen
5 May 2008 |