I took a walk this morning at sunrise, this 18th of September, down the hill and across the brook to the woods gully. There’s a fox den on the embankment and I headed that way facing into the sun. The grass in the path was soaked with dew. At the edge of the woods where the trail descends steeply to the brook crossing, I entered a darker space where the sunlight was divided by the breaks in the trees into individual beams with singular illumination, some ricocheting off the flora into the darkness and some finding a spot on the forest floor as if focused through a piece of glass. There it would burn off the wetness and cause wisps of steam to waft upward.
At the top of the gully far off to my right there was a flash of whiteness. It was there and then it was gone; one of those things that happen when, later on as you think back on it, you wonder if you saw anything at all. Could’ve been a piece of foliage briefly catching the light, or an aberrant firing of an optical nerve cell. It was that quick. This has happened to me often enough however to know that it was the flagging of a whitetail deer: it’s upraised tail, the whiteness of it, catching the slant of one of those beams of light for a duration of time measured in the blink of an eye. I heard the dull hoof-thuds of the leaping deer; a twig snapped. Otherwise it made its escape quietly and but for the ray of sunlight it would have remained unobserved.
So it was with the circles of light suspended above the woods floor. They weren’t there at first, at the moment of the deer encounter. Although my eyes had scanned the woods looking after the deer, I didn’t see them. Not until I continued my walk and turned into a shaft of light did one appear practically before my eyes: the near perfect circle of webbing spun and suspended between two trees by an orb weaver. If I took a step sideways, it would disappear from the light, but then others beyond would appear. Within the darkness and back-lit, they seemed to be self-illuminating and hovering; fragile little faerie wheels of exquisite manufacture. They were everywhere it seemed, revealing themselves only when properly aligned with the light. Had I been walking in another direction it would have been as if they didn’t exist at all unless, of course, I had walked into one and gotten a face full. That has happened too, often enough, at other times in various locations.
I came to the fox den, the one where in the winter, on my skis and gliding quietly, I had caught the red fox napping outside the entrance, curled up in the snow in a spot of sunlight. I came close enough then to take a couple of photos with my pocket camera before it heard me or sensed me, and disappeared not back into the den, but off into the woods. This time the fox revealed itself only by what it had left on the mound of the den: a few scattered bones of its prey.I left the den and the bones and continued on up the trail. By then the quality of the light had changed, filtering through the canopy of the woods and becoming diffuse. For a while there, seen “in a different light,” ordinary things like deer tails and spider webs had assumed a primal level of importance.
It was almost magical.
