Free The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass Page B

untouched snow and the shredded terraces and canyons they have cut frantically, desperately, with their sharp hoofs—eight or ten deer working long and hard in a concentrated area, pawing and pawing, like salmon pushing upstream through the rapids—reveals to even our soft and comfortable lives a sharper and fuller and fairly horrifying glimpse into, if not understanding of, the true nature of hunger: the ceaseless, nearly volcanic forcefulness of it.
    Those new-cut canyons and terraces look exactly like the landforms of the desert Southwest, where violent rivers crossing magnificent spans of time have carved similar features not over the course of a single day or evening but across millions of years; and in either instance, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the signature of hunger; and we ski on past.
    The fourth thing, every bit as delicious as the first three: the way the ground, the wonderful bare ground (I'm speaking now of the extreme end of February, and that only in a dry year, such as this one), first opens up around the trunks of the largest trees, umbrellas and ellipses of bare earth, first amid the snow, where each tree's branches (particularly the spruce) have trapped the day's heat and held it there for a little while, into each night, thinning that ice further and further until it is there that the earth first reappears, around the bases of those trees.
    The darkened trunks of the trees likewise absorb, with differential vigor, the heat of the sun, mild though it is, while the snow everywhere else reflects and diffuses it back into the atmosphere; and again, on into the night, the absorbed heat in those blackened tree trunks radiates slowly back out across the snow, warmest on the west side, which is the part of the tree trunk that received the last and most intense heat of the day. The bare earth appears here first, in that west-canted ellipse that makes it appear as if someone or something has been buried at the base of that tree, at the base of every tree, feet pointing west, the soil appearing so recently excavated that no snow has yet fallen on the gravesite.
    It is, of course, no death that is being marked, but birth, first birth; and in late February, when the earth first begins to show itself again, the hungry eye of the winterer lingers on these open patches first, and marvels at the random, intricate beauty of last autumn's cache of twigs and leaves and pine needles revealed once more: a miracle of delicious specificity after so long a sameness of white.
    You watch those grave-shaped patches of earth grow from hamster-size plots into something larger, day by day and night by night, more and more earth appearing in that same west-southwest cant, like a sundial of the waking dead—the patches of earth shrugging off more and more snow until now the earthy openings at the base of each tree are nearly suitable for something the size of the family dog, and then larger, able almost to fit a human beneath them. (On some mild days, with the return of the sun, you're able to recline on some drying gentle slope of earth, upon such a plot, and stare out at the snowy marsh and listen to the south wind and the barking of ravens—no other birds yet, but soon, very soon.) Still, even when there is enough earth available to house a full-grown human body, even when there is enough earth available to house such a creature, such a specimen, as yourself, it's not over yet.
    It is still fully winter—a glance at the tracks of deer, which are leaving blood in their prints from where they occasionally punch through the weakening ice, cutting their hocks, will provide as graphic an example as any that it is not over yet—and it's important not to disembark yet, in your overeagerness, from the slow-unfolding wave of winter, important not to be lured too far out into the open, yet, important not to rush or be rushed. It's important to honor the shortest month with caution, and to ride it all the