Free The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass Page A

vigor, while that warmth is deflected away from the bed of white snow in which the lichen has landed, so that by comparison the lichens resting in that snow at day's end are as hot as the new-burnt tips of match heads; and those warmer lichens settle down into the snow perfectly, like veins wrapped in flesh, sinking down into the snow like the ancient cliché of the hot knife into butter, the lichen chilling sufficiently to slow its descent only when it has sunk to a depth of being level with the snow rather than resting atop it, sinking that millimeter downward, powered by its own warmth, like a swimmer submerging.
    And then night comes again, and the melting snow freezes taut to a shiny cast, with that filigree of lichen embedded by the cooling clutch of the night; and sealed down in the ice like that, the lichen seems like some elegant signature, or like a valuable thing preserved and embossed for all time in that cast. In December and January, the lichen just kind of blows around and drifts here and there and is buried by new snow upon old snow; but in February, the lichen saws its way down into the snow and ice, trapped there and fitting each tendril into each groove of its heat-seared cast so perfectly that the indelible signature of each lichen cannot be pried out of its embossed slate but will remain there, housed in the ice until the snow has melted completely and the sodden lichen rests on the bare forest floor, where it might wait all spring and then into the summer, growing drier and drier, as if waiting for the drift of some loose July or August spark to catch in its nest and ignite...
    The third thing that speaks to me of the pattern of February is the pawed-up snow at the fringes of the previously serene marsh: vast excavation of snow where the herds of deer and elk have ventured from out of the jungles of alders and willows at marsh's edge to claw at the snow with their hoofs, each dainty hoof and slender leg scraping away the snow to get to the dry grass and reeds below as if operating a miniature backhoe, on a cold morning after a heavy snow.
    After such storms, in which a foot or more might fall, the marsh is where the deer go to find their for-certain feed; the place where they can always count on something being there for them, in those vast bent-over dry-hay swaths of autumn-dead reed-grass, even if relatively low in nutrition, by February.
    In February, after one of the big storms, the deer can wander out into the marsh and not have to worry about picking and choosing through the snow to find this or that preferred food item, all vanished beneath the new snow now like the needle in the haystack, and instead can merely lower their heads and like poor dumb brute animals paw steadily, mindlessly, and almost ceaselessly at the new snow overlying the marsh, no matter how deep, and they know they'll be rewarded with something.
    In a few days, some of the snow back in the woods will melt again, and new trails will be cut by the herd's wandering passages, leading to one food source after another, and the
Bryoria
will continue to fall from the trees, blown by the wind; but in that first day or two following the big wet snowstorms of February, the deer and elk come out into the amphitheater of the marsh, the place where they know they can always find something, and with that strange backhoe digging motion begin scraping away the snow, excavating their way down to the dead and colorless stalks of autumn, and nibble away: chewing that dry grass as much for the heat generated by the digestion, the fermentation, as for whatever leached-out nutrients might linger in the cell walls of those stalks. It is a sobering sight to see them doing this, one that always only increases the respect we have for the deer.
    Sometimes after such a big storm, we don't see them out there pawing at the snow but instead will see, while out on our skis, only where they have been; and the disparity between the perfect smoothness of the