By Geoffrey Norman
Photography by Hubert Schriebl
It was January and cold the way it can get when a big high pressure system parks itself over New England for three or four days. The temperature never got much above ten degrees in the middle of the day and it dropped like a stone when the sun went down. By two or three in the morning, it was twenty below and still falling. There was no cloud cover and no wind, so there was a kind of epic stillness to the air. At night, the sky was crowded with stars and they seemed unusually close.
I'd taken a late afternoon walk, on snowshoes, and was telling a friend about it.
"You know," I said, ponderously, "there is something different about the woods in winter."
"Could it be they're colder?" my friend said.
"So that's it."
I wasn't going to win the point so I didn't try to explain what I'd meant. But I knew I had meant something. There was more to it than the cold. During the winter months, the woods are different in kind, not merely in degree. Since that day, I've thought a lot about what I was trying to say. It isn't a distinction that will determine the rise or fall of empires, or anything like that, but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting. Any little insight about the world pays off. The better you understand your environment, the more comfortable you are living in it.
So, start with my friend's crack. The winter woods are obviously, undeniably cold. Not just chilly, either, but cold enough to kill. It is always true that life out there in the wild is about survival and this essential becomes even more urgent when the temperature falls. Different creatures employ different strategies for surviving the cold. The snowshoe hare changes color, from a fawn-brown to white to blend with the snow and conceal himself from predators.
Deer grow a coarser coat. They actually have less hair but their coats appear shaggier. This is because the hairs of the winter coat are hollow and air-filled for better insulation. You don't see that many deer when you are on snowshoes, walking the logging roads. This is because they have generally moved into stands of conifers where the snow is not so deep. They go into these yards for survival but, then, in winters that are especially long and cold with a lot of snow that doesn't run off until late, they can get trapped and when they have browsed everything they can reach, they begin wasting away, falling prey to coyotes or dogs, or simply starving. In the spring, you'll find what the crows and other carrion-eaters have left.
Maybe because you don't even expect to see deer-or any other very large animals-the winter woods seem less active than at other times of the year. They are quieter, more church-like.
