As "done" with winter as Alison and I have recently become, still the images a camera can claim attract my eye. Every walk is a new walk, as Ammons wrote. Unlike much that poets write, this one is true. There is always news to report.

I know that my desire to see otters and sign of otters causes me to manufacture their evidence, but I don't know what other than an otter could have made that long slide in the snow along the bank-ice and then formed the entrance and exit paths into and out of the river. Possums are not that agile; they don't go into the river when they can help it. Raccoons are fatter than that path. Muskrats could never leave footprints twenty inches apart. A mink would have been smaller. So I say "Otter."

Some four inches of new, airy snow fell lightly on every branch and twig, and in the absence of wind, it piled and mounded on every surface. So I went down to see.

I counted more than sixty deer that evening in the east field. On the phone, my brother sounded like someone who had just been told that a very old man with enormous wings had just landed in my backyard. All the antlers have dropped, probably several weeks ago. The question for me remains: "Where do so many deer go once the hunting begins?"

The big event coming up that we all are excited about is the sixtieth wedding anniversary of Jerry and Carol. An epic migration of people beholden to these two teenagers takes place next week. None of us will be able to say what we feel, but everyone will know.