The wind is talking to the trees this afternoon. High above the forest floor, the green boughs of the pines and hemlocks are reaching way out and waving to one another; the bare maple branches are swinging and knocking into each other; and the dried brown leaves still clinging to the beeches and oaks are spinning, crinkling and crackling. Every once in a while a large trunk moans and creaks as it rubs against its neighbor.
The low afternoon sun is peeking through the bottom limbs far in the distance, casting a golden light on the stream’s slow-moving current and riffles, seemingly flowing downriver along with the water; and bathes the tops of the swaying pines that cover the hillside above the stream, a beacon from the depths of the dark forest below. Snow covers the ground, pockmarked from the erratic thawing and freezing over the past week, and dusted with small branches, green tips, and bits of bark that have been loosed by the wind and tossed to the ground. I barely feel the wind on my face while protected by the trees in the bowels of the forest, hidden in the gullies, but I can hear it all around me. It catches my attention, keeps me alert, draws my eyes up and outward, and makes me feel much more lively than I was earlier while sitting by the wood stove reading my latest book.
Suddenly my ears perk up – over the noise of the wind I hear the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker. I search the nearby trees to find the noisemaker, and finally see a large Hairy Woodpecker boring deep into a broken branch on the red maple a few feet away from the trail. He works steadily, staying on the broken branch for several minutes, then circles round the branch and back to the main trunk, which he ascends by clinging and jumping his way towards the sky, stopping occasionally to test the wood for decay, the branches getting smaller and smaller as he rises, together swaying back and forth in the wind, until he reaches the top and jumps off, flying far above the treetops and into the heart of the wind, quickly disappearing from sight.
