Inventory

Inventory

The hares didn’t move last night
but there are signs
of a female fisher there
and there quartering.
What has to eat
has to eat.
The browse line isn’t visible
for the snow. White cedar, then hemlock—
the deers’ choice. They have gone
to a deer yard some miles off.

A fisher can take a fox.
Deer and hare the prey species here.
Snowshoe hares . . . their hind paws so large
—well they need them.
I saw a fox once
leap and pounce in the snow
haul up a vole and eat it.
How a fisher kills a porcupine—
she bites its face then flips it
and rips open the stomach.
I have never seen this
only the aftermath.

White cedar, hemlock,
and further up the few beech
not yet destroyed by the European fungus.
The roots keep returning
but will the beech nut
which the squirrel, the fox,
even the bobcat will eat.
Snow clumps on needles
and the beech holds its leaves through the year.

Moose go up slope, deer down.
The downy the hairy all stay here
and the pileated.

See here the otter tracks
and the sign of an otter slide
on the lake and there
a mink slide—
they too can.
If you go inside
to the Discovery Center
you can see the arrowheads
found along the shore of Rich Lake.

Do you need snowshoes?
Do you need poles?
Do you need a guide
out here today
in the woods—the great woods
of the Haudenosaunee,
the woods of the North Country
as it’s now called on the maps.