A little night music

Snow goose migration. Copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.

IT WAS AN UNSEASONABLY TEMPERATE DAY FOR THE HIGH PLAINS IN EARLY MARCH, A FEW CIRRUS CLOUDS AGAINST A CLEAR SKY AND THE TEMPERATURE RISING INTO THE SIXTIES.   Shirtsleeve weather.  I’d spent the afternoon artfully camouflaged at the edge of a spread of snow goose decoys with little hope of success.  Four dozen decoys is a reasonably large spread when the quarry is the wily mallard, and, in Wyoming, it’s usually enough to fool the occasional Canada goose.

Snow geese in the spring are a different proposition.  At about five in the afternoon, I heard the first tenor call somewhere in the west.  It took a long minute to make them out against the fathomless blue of the March sky, a chevron of white specks, impossibly high, a hundred birds or more, intent on the traveling chant that carries them across two thousand miles from the southern plains to the tundra at the edge of Queen Maude Gulf.  They were not to be moved by my pathetic offering so far beneath them.

Over the next two hours, I watched three or four thousand more pass overhead, their ranks punctuated now and then by flocks of sandhill cranes, just as high, an occasional V of mallards, and the trailing cohorts of the Canada goose migration, the diminutive cacklers who were heading almost as far north as the snows.

The sun sank behind the mountains at last, and I set about gathering decoys as the night deepened.  In the last light, weary geese began settling into the marsh in small bunches until the night was filled with their gossip— a garrulous bunch, these birds, in the security of the night.  Flocks of sandhills followed, so low I could hear their primaries cutting the air as counterpoint to that strange trill they share as they fly— resonant woodwind voices, otherworldly, a sound from the Pleistocene.  When I looked up, I could just make out the silhouettes of their formations against the brightening stars as they swept low overhead on their way to the shallows out in the middle of the basin.

The breeze had been steady out of the west all day, but it died with the sun, so all the wild conversation of the marsh stood out in the silence and the dark, the small talk of beings who cross a continent the way I travel my front walk— confident, casual, the small talk of far travelers.

The moon rose in the east, only a night or two past full, to shed its pale light on the marsh, brightening the darkness, as it always does, without revealing anything, which it never does.  I could tell by the sound that the edge of the roosting flock of geese was no more than a hundred yards away, but they couldn’t see me, nor I, them.  Sure of their privacy, they gabbled their secrets, careless of who might be around to hear them.

After I’d finished gathering my gear and strapping it on the cart, I started the long pull back to the truck, while the thousands of voices around me vibrated in the moonlight, and the sensation came to me as it sometimes does when I walk through wild places in the dark, the feeling that I’ve been admitted to something denied to humans in the daylight world, a moment when all the ancient barriers are lifted and kindred spirits speak to each other and are heard.

Magic.  It’s become a pale word, stripped of the power it once had over us, but what other word is there to describe that moment?  I walked in the moonlight, with the chorus rising all around me, wrapped in magic.  Such are the gifts that come, unexpected, to a wanderer in the night.