Running was hard. I thought, "I really hate running"... "I don't want to do this"... "This is impossible"... "How am I ever going to get up Heartbreak Hill?"... "When will the breeze cool me down?"... "I think my toe is going numb"... and other negative thoughts. But then I pulled myself together, or "pulled myself towards myself" as Jess used to say, pressed on, and it became easier and easier and in the end I ran 2.46 miles (3.95km)!
I left my water bottle on top of a little woodpile in the forest, where a tree blew down once and someone cut it up and took the trouble to stack the wood into a small pile. When I drank long and hard from the bottle after the run, I noticed many little grey feathers scattered about on top of the wood and on the surrounding pine-needled floor. I imagined the death which had taken place, the tearing apart of small bones and flesh, the use of beak and talon. The suspect: a hawk which has been frequenting the area around our bird-feeder and which surprised me in the forest yesterday, when it took off quietly from a spot close to my head, flying swiftly and expertly through the tall trees without knocking into anything.
The common belief is that animals move about perfectly within their own domains, never making mistakes, but I have observed several clumsinesses:
A squirrel chase 50 feet above us in the trees ended with one plummeting to the ground right in front of us once when we were camping in Maine. The boys and I stood gazing at the little dead body, wondering what to do, when suddenly she came to, looked vaguely embarrassed, and teetered off like a drunken lush, gaining balance as she proceeded into the undergrowth.
Yesterday I came walking up the steps of the deck to see two fat doves happily pecking on the ground beneath the bird-feeder. They were shocked into action, running up the rock away from this intruder on their skinny red legs, when one of them tripped and almost fell on her beak!
And I have a video that I took of 3 cormorants on a rock in Clarke's pond. One cormorant takes a leap off, mightily flapping just above the water for an endless time, eventually gaining height and flying into the distance. After a while the second cormorant dips quietly into the water and dives down, feeding. The third, left alone on the rock, looks nervously about, then he too slips into the water, paddling with his little webbed feet. Up pops the second cormorant from her dive, a few inches from the third cormorant, who, taken unawares, flaps his wings and almost leaps straight up out of the water in fright!
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