Thank you, Steve Himmer for hosting me, and thank you, everyone who came to read these essays and such during my month as the writer in residence at Necessary Fiction. As a coda, a palate cleanser, a parting shot, I’ve posted some photographs I took of animals this winter. I find it fascinating that the beaver and the turkeys were virtually extinct in this area until my lifetime. A hundred or so years ago in western Massachusetts, there was nothing bigger than a squirrel and most of the trees had been razed. Now the wetlands are dominated by beavers; I’ve seen flocks of fifteen turkeys wander by me in the woods, and there are moose, coy-wolves, bobcats, fishers, and bears around, all of which would have been a very rare sight when this rural region was more populated by humans.

As the snow and ice recede around here, they reveal frozen, swollen tracks from earlier in the winter. The ice melts around the tamped-down tracks, making them bulge out. When I walk in the woods and around the ponds now I see where I skied and walked months ago. Sometimes I see where I was following a predator who was following its prey—so there’s my tracks, the coyote’s, and the beaver’s like we were once strolling together, all now magnified convexities in the ice, preserved like fossils.

A pair of beavers diving for lily roots during a thaw.

An opossum. It looks like the tip of his tail froze off.

My neighbor, Jack, the cat, and a cow skull.

A tom turkey as the pupil in my hemlock spectacles. There’s a lot of looking going on in this photo. I made the specs in my hemlock hedge so I could see the front yard from my living room window. You can see me with my camera in the reflection of the window.

A beaver. I tracked him by his muddy prints and got very close to him.

A deer with turkeys grazing for frozen dropped apples.

A frozen frog like a mosaic on a pond.

A duck at the turkey farm.

Tree lobster in Amherst, MA.

A vulture in late March. They’ve only been back in town for a couple weeks.