Going for a walk

By Christine Tailer
HCP columnist

I pulled on my thick socks and pushed my feet down inside my heavy leather work boots. As I tightened the laces, I wiggled my toes to make sure that I was not cutting off their circulation. It was a chilly 11 degrees outside, but the dogs had convinced us to go for a walk.

I looked up from my boot tying to see Greg putting on his fleece-lined cap with the pull-down ear flaps. I don't know why, but whenever I see that cap on his head I want to laugh.

I think it is because he reminds me of my second-grade friend, Robert Townsend, who wore a gray wool cap much like it, many, many years ago.

I held back my laughter, but Greg must have seen a sparkle in my eye because he asked me what I thought was so funny. I told him that I was just happy to be going on a winter walk.

We walked down the hill in front of the cabin, stepping quite carefully. The ground was dusted with a light covering of icy snow, perhaps an eighth of an inch thick. It was just enough to make our gravel driveway quite slippery.

The dogs bounded on ahead as we slowly made our way down to the one-lane blacktopped road that runs along the creek.

We turned right at the tobacco barn and headed down creek. There were no tracks at all on the asphalt road and it looked like a white expanse of icy runway. I could clearly see the footprints left behind by the dogs.

They both appeared to have started off walking, one on either side of the road, and then the larger set of footprints veered over toward the smaller set, and then they both took off in a gallop of hind-feet meeting fore-feet, into the field of winter wheat.

I wondered what creature had lured them into a chase. I could see them still patroling the far edge of the field, noses to the icy ground.

On down the road, I saw the precise footprints of a raccoon as it crossed from the field side over toward the creek. I could clearly see that the creek was not frozen solid, but had large white rolls of ice on the down creek side of the rocks. Easily half of the creek surface was covered in ice and I wondered what food the raccoon might have found in the half-frozen creek.

A bit farther down the road we came across the tracks of a mother rabbit and her young. I bent down to get a closer look at the little rabbit's footprints. They were absolutely perfect. I imagined the little creature following its mother about, learning where to look for food in the winter world.

And then we came upon the footprints of what must have been a flock of robins. The long rear toe and three front toes were clearly imprinted on the icy road. It appeared to me that there must have been 20 or more of the birds, but then perhaps there were only one or two and they had just hopped about in the same spot for a long time. I could not figure out why they had been there. There were no seeds or other robin edibles that I could find.

And of course, two-toed deer tracks crossed the road every so often.

Finally, we came to the gate at the end of the road and turned around to head home. There, laid out before us was the story of our walk.

Greg's larger footprints and mine, sometimes close together, other times farther apart.

Sometimes I could tell that we had walked quickly, striding easily along, and other times we had obviously paused, our footprints side by side, as we stopped to look at other tracks in the snow.

I noticed that occasionally our heels scuffed the ground behind each step, and then other times each step was clearly outlined in foot print perfection.

The sun began to flicker through the grey sky and light up the snow-covered road in bright patches here and there. The ice crystals sparkled.

I knew that it would soon be warm enough to melt the snow and erase our footprints, the dogs and deer, the rabbits, robins, and raccoons. We had all left our tracks in the creek valley snow.

Christine Tailer is an attorney and former city dweller who moved several years ago, with her husband, Greg, to an off-grid farm in south-central Ohio. Visit them on the web at straightcreekvalleyfarm.com.