Quiet In The Woods

[King Cobra]

Amen.

[Cowboy]

Excellent read. Smoothly written and just as you were there. Thanks!

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[JeffC]

Great read, thanks for sharing, I hope you are willing to share more in the future, look forward to more of your writing.

[Tom007]

The June/July issue of Garden & Gun is worth the price of admission just for the turkey illustration alone. Thought y'all might like the final scene from this essay. Here's a link to the full: https://gardenandgun.com/feature/quiet-in-the-woods/
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The woods are waking up around me, and I have to fight off the urge to rush things. I wait a few minutes for the light to get up before I call, and when I do it is nothing loud or startling, just a subtle tree yelp sent from the bell of a trumpet. I am not expecting the response. There is no beat of wing or fly down, just gravity and ground, the dull thud of the bird hitting earth as he drops off the limb like a stone. He stands in the clearing and cranes his neck to study the layered shadows where the call has come from, but I am cupped in a dark hollow that light has yet to find, and no matter how hard he tries, he cannot see me. For the turkey, survival requires absolute certainty, and so the wood line becomes his line in sand. He will not come any closer.

A dogwood winter sets his breath to air, every gobble a sound written out like a score of smoke that hangs before him till the echo fades. He swells into strut and rakes his wing tips through the frosted grass, his head drained white as ice. For a long time, this is all that exists between us. I am a tree, and he is a dancer. The sun takes an hour to crest the pines, to warm that glacial blue dawn, and in that time he walks like eyes across a page, without one step taken into the margins.

When the first rays break the treetops, I watch his feathers turn to stained glass, a fan backlit bronze and barred, the outer curve fringed in gold. I cannot move, and I do not want to. Here is where I would spend my forever, heaven and earth the very same place, though even while I breathe it, I know that it cannot last. As quickly as it has come, it will go. There is always the flip of the switch. The world is awash with miracles, and I am thankful to simply bear witness.



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Well written Dave