Essay: July 24

Boundaries

By Elizabeth Hunter

Several months ago, when logging crews moved simultaneously and noisily onto two adjacent properties about half way along my walking route, I abandoned a practice that gives my dogs and me much joy: our morning constitutional. We quit walking because the ugly dismantling of forest land I’d learned to love looking at so angered me as to eclipse the walk’s benefit. The dogs, of course, had no idea why we no longer walked. For weeks, the elder of the two, Lucy — an old yeller mop of a dog, my animal shelter prize — kept her eyes pinned hopefully on the front door, awaiting any sign of me and her favorite sequence of human utterances: “Want to go on a walk?”

The loggers, inexplicably, abandoned the tracts a few weeks after they bulldozed their way onto them. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to resume walking past those shattered woods. For a while, moving mulch and planting the garden seemed sufficient substitute. But as spring gave way to summer, tying up tomatoes and moving watering hoses from one rain barrel to another replaced the more physical work. At the beginning of July — long after I should have — I re-instituted morning walks.

The dogs were ecstatic. Tootie, Lucy’s compatriot, is a gray, curly-haired stray, part-terrier that Lucy welcomed into our shared life 18 months ago. For the first month after he took up residence — gnawing on Lucy’s collection of deer bones scavenged from the woods, supping on her chow, and sleeping on her bed — Toot shot off into the woods whenever I opened the door. Then, for no reason I could discern, he adopted me. We’ve lived mostly happily ever after, except when the moon’s full and he barks all night.

Every morning now, about the time it gets light, I step out the door and ask Lucy’s favorite question. Such ardent answers: leaps, twirls, whines, strenuous body language signifying yes, yes, yes. When I disappear back inside for binoculars and dog biscuits, Lucy is all anxiety, though Toot has faith. He zips around the flower beds in a delirious frenzy until I reach for the leashes, by which time he’s panting hard. Straining against their collars, they pull me up the driveway and onto the road.

It’s our quality time together, these early mornings, though the worlds to which we attend are different as daylight and dark: the dogs alert to signposts of scent left by every living thing that has followed or crossed our route in the past 24 hours; I, all eyes for the extravagant leaf and tree silhouettes softened by mist rising from the river, all ears for wood thrush cadences, the trilling “drink your tea” of towhee, the “robin with a sore throat” territorial announcements of the three male scarlet tanagers who enforce boundary demarcations from the tallest tree on their lot. Tanager property lines don’t coincide with ours, though they’re as scrupulously maintained.

Though we walk the same mile and a half up and down the road every day, we never get bored with our route. There’s too much to smell and see and hear — and to anticipate. Lucy and Toot are breathless to round a particular bend in the road, where three days last week we encountered a good-sized rabbit, tantalizingly motionless at the edge of the road until we narrowed the gap between us to about 50 feet.

Though Toot seems loath to wade into dew-drenched grass when we pull over to let the occasional car or pickup pass, he has no such compunctions when we reach the spot the rabbit just vacated. Nose to the ground he hauls us toward the tangle of honeysuckle and briar into which the rabbit disappeared. Lucy’s game; I’m not. We continue down the road.

A cluster of mailboxes at our walk’s halfway point is of intense interest to my companions. A real communications hub — and not only for my neighbors, who receive their mail and weekly newspaper here. Every four-footed creature, including my pair, leave their calling cards on posts and in a muddy spot just beyond the mailboxes, where I read hoofprint of deer, delicately splayed handprint of possum, the padded calligraphy of dog and bobcat. Embedded in the mud: the iridescent wings of a pipevine swallowtail run down while sipping salts.

I’m learning the complicated song of the indigo bunting from the male perched on the wire at Sparks Tree Farm. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to discover black throated green warblers sharing a patch of disassembled woods with a whole family of bluebirds, the fledglings with their brown speckled breasts side by side on a wire. I don’t know which of the many spots the dogs daily examine most sets their hearts to racing; my own current thrill of thrills is the hummingbird nest I inadvertently discovered when a female hummer distracted me from watching one of the tanagers. The nest’s now abandoned, but in my mind’s eye I’ve marked the spot at the side of the road I have to stand in to pick it out. I’ve stopped there so many times to lift my binoculars and study that one special lichen-covered bump on the branch that Lucy anticipates that pause and begins clicking her teeth (a signal to me to pass the biscuits) while we’re still 20 paces down the road.