under the skin
by David Ackley
Every few days on one our walks, the dog and I go to the river, a shallow stream where I used to fish for brook trout and which still looks like trout water, though it no longer holds many.
A dirt path, double tracked from the pickups of fishermen, runs along the right bank for a few hundred yards, bending left with the river, between it and a pond where beaver build their lodges and snip off alder and birch for nourishment and where we see the occasional carousing otter, and during the spring and fall migrations, merganser and buffle-head ducks, and sometimes as many as forty Canada geese. It's a pretty spot with intermittent looks at the mountains and the way the light fractures across the little peaks and valleys of the stream's riffles, shifting constantly from dark to bright and back again.
Occasionally, a pair of ducks or geese take up residence and raise a clutch, but the pond must be too small to support more than those few, a harder life than you might suppose from the idyllic appearance of the place.
The path comes to a dead end, closed off by forest growth, and, as usual, we climb down the bank so the dog can sniff along the edge or drink and wet his feet in the cool shallows on this hot day. Here the river drops down a long, bouncy riffle, then smooths out and narrows in perspective between looming grey boulders before it swings to the right into a cave of overhanging pines and disappears. Perhaps because it opens a space in the greenery like a long straight hallway that penetrates deep into a dwelling, you can sometimes glimpse the unexpected. I keep an eye out for deer or maybe a young black bear splashing across the shallows.
That's why, as the dog laps up his drink, his leash slack between us, I catch sight of the mother duck, a merganser by the red head, paddling quickly from the shore to the middle of the stream, closely trailed by a single puff of yellow down, tiny, bobbing along in her wake. It seems odd that she'd risk her offspring to the current, though it rides over the little waves of the riffle buoyant as a ping-pong ball and stays nicely close to her tail feathers.
And that there's only the one seems odd, too. By the time I think this, they've turned downstream and move rapidly away, a little faster than the current, which, luckily, is not too heavy. She's paddling, making it harder than need be for the duckling to keep up.
And then it's gone.
I hadn't taken my eye away, hadn't blinked. There'd been no disturbance, no sign of pursuit, not a suspicious ripple. Yet the yellow puff is gone, and though I watch and wait, it fails to reappear.
The mother paddles on without a glance back to betray that it ever existed. Or does she need to believe it's still there?
I watch her all the way out of sight around the bend, realizing only then that she could have taken to the air but didn't, was still on the river when she passed from view.
I watch her all the way out of sight, unsure what it is I've just witnessed save perhaps a small intimation of what lies under the surface, under the skin of the world, waiting.
by David Ackley
Every few days on one our walks, the dog and I go to the river, a shallow stream where I used to fish for brook trout and which still looks like trout water, though it no longer holds many.
A dirt path, double tracked from the pickups of fishermen, runs along the right bank for a few hundred yards, bending left with the river, between it and a pond where beaver build their lodges and snip off alder and birch for nourishment and where we see the occasional carousing otter, and during the spring and fall migrations, merganser and buffle-head ducks, and sometimes as many as forty Canada geese. It's a pretty spot with intermittent looks at the mountains and the way the light fractures across the little peaks and valleys of the stream's riffles, shifting constantly from dark to bright and back again.
Occasionally, a pair of ducks or geese take up residence and raise a clutch, but the pond must be too small to support more than those few, a harder life than you might suppose from the idyllic appearance of the place.
The path comes to a dead end, closed off by forest growth, and, as usual, we climb down the bank so the dog can sniff along the edge or drink and wet his feet in the cool shallows on this hot day. Here the river drops down a long, bouncy riffle, then smooths out and narrows in perspective between looming grey boulders before it swings to the right into a cave of overhanging pines and disappears. Perhaps because it opens a space in the greenery like a long straight hallway that penetrates deep into a dwelling, you can sometimes glimpse the unexpected. I keep an eye out for deer or maybe a young black bear splashing across the shallows.
That's why, as the dog laps up his drink, his leash slack between us, I catch sight of the mother duck, a merganser by the red head, paddling quickly from the shore to the middle of the stream, closely trailed by a single puff of yellow down, tiny, bobbing along in her wake. It seems odd that she'd risk her offspring to the current, though it rides over the little waves of the riffle buoyant as a ping-pong ball and stays nicely close to her tail feathers.
And that there's only the one seems odd, too. By the time I think this, they've turned downstream and move rapidly away, a little faster than the current, which, luckily, is not too heavy. She's paddling, making it harder than need be for the duckling to keep up.
And then it's gone.
I hadn't taken my eye away, hadn't blinked. There'd been no disturbance, no sign of pursuit, not a suspicious ripple. Yet the yellow puff is gone, and though I watch and wait, it fails to reappear.
The mother paddles on without a glance back to betray that it ever existed. Or does she need to believe it's still there?
I watch her all the way out of sight around the bend, realizing only then that she could have taken to the air but didn't, was still on the river when she passed from view.
I watch her all the way out of sight, unsure what it is I've just witnessed save perhaps a small intimation of what lies under the surface, under the skin of the world, waiting.
