Walking the Creek on a Charmed Winter Day

I stepped onto Otter Creek, my bootheel slipped, and I almost landed on my butt.  After a moment of waving my arms as though I were designing an aircraft that would use dual propellers, I caught my balance.  Where the snow hadn’t accumulated, I noted sagaciously, the ice was slick.  Ideal traveling footwear might have been golf shoes, or at least boots with crampons, but my rubber-bottomed Muck Boots weren’t meant for this.  I took a deep breath and gathered myself.  This icy patch was big – about twenty feet long.  An idea.  I pushed off and crouched over my boots to see how far I could slide.  Four or five feet.  Pretty cool.  I attempted a moonwalk as Duke watched with perked ears from the bank.  If Duke had known anything about dancing he would have been embarrassed, but that’s why people keep dogs.  They keep their criticism to themselves.

It was a glorious winter day.  The temperature had risen to a balmy 10°, so Duke and I were out for a walk.  He wasn’t sure about the ice.  I crossed to the far side of the creek and called him.  Duke ran along the bank, looking for a way to reach me without stepping on the ice, but of course there was no way to cross the creek without crossing it.  But dogs are empirical learners, and even tautologies do not impress them, so Duke had to find out for himself.  At length satisfied that the creek was indeed a lengthy obstacle that would require direct confrontation, he stepped gingerly to the ice’s edge and sniffed it.  He put his front paws on the creek and paused.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I called.  “Come on.”

Reluctantly he stepped onto the ice.  His paws spread wide and his claws pressed against the slick surface.  Eyes on the ice, paws clicking, he scuttled toward me.  He scuttled right past and did not turn around until he’d reached the bank behind me.  I congratulated him on his bravery, he congratulated me on not busting my ass, and we proceeded downstream.



Otter Creek is a highway for animals moving through the area.  It runs the entire length of the parcel, and deer moving between fields commonly stay in the creekbed where they’re hard to spot unless, like I do when I’m hunting, you sit atop a nearby hill and peer down with binoculars.  In places you can see their trail along the bank.  After I moved a few yards downstream a thin layer of snow covered the creek and the footing was more secure.  I met with a set of coyote tracks – the only other animal besides me to walk over the ice since the snow, apparently.  The coyote had stayed on the ice, veering at times toward one bank or the other.  Probably to sniff for moles or muskrats.  Around a bend the regular spacing of the canine prints stopped and beside a cluster of paw prints was a pile of scat.  Duke, who had at length decided that travel on the snowed-over sections of ice was safe, sniffed the excrement and freshened it with a few drops of his own scent before trotting ahead.

In winter, the mountain men might also have used a thoroughfare like this.  When forced to find a way through unfamiliar terrain without the benefit of a trail, the mountain men struggled nearly as much as I had when hiking off-trail in the Rockies and Sierras.  In his narrative of his years as a fur trapper, Warren Ferris left no doubt that he preferred following trails.  When there was no established route, he wrote about following alongside serpentine streambeds, getting hemmed in by rocky bluffs, being slowed down by interlocking fallen trees, skirting hair-raising precipices, skittering across recently-avalanched rocks that tumbled downhill when dislodged.  Retracing steps was common.  “Had I followed a guide,” he once wrote, “no doubt much fatigue, danger and distance, would have been avoided, but ignorant as I was of the proper route, I was compelled to follow the tortuous course of the river; often to retrace my steps, and seek a more practicable passage, from some abrupt precipice, or perpendicular descent . . .”  On one occasion Ferris followed up a day of easy traveling on which he’d made 28 miles with a day when he had to find his own trail and made only 6 miles.  No doubt a wide, flat route like Otter Creek would have satisfied Ferris immensely.  I recalled spots in the Salt River Range and the Wasatch Front where I’d followed the courses of not-yet-frozen streams and wished I could just walk through the water.  An iced-over stream like this made for ideal traveling.

It really was a charmed day.  Along the bank Duke and I flushed two sharptailed grouse, who burst into the air with the sounds of small helicopters taking off, and in an opening in the ice I saw several four- or five-inch trout working to stay in place in the fast-moving water.  They darted under the ice at my approach and I knelt beside the opening to see if they would reappear.  The trout could travel in the streams the whole year, I thought with envy.  As I waited on the trout I looked at the sky to judge the time before sunset.  A flock of Canada geese was passing above, a massive line of black dots sweeping above the earth, the shape of their formation ever-changing but always maintaining one or two points, the birds arrayed at a forty-five degree angle behind the lead bird, some geese flying behind the line then catching up to take their places, others dropping back to take up a position elsewhere.  In minutes they covered distances that would take me hours to traverse.  I felt an envy that is probably as old as imagination.

“But they can’t moonwalk,” I said to Duke.

You can’t either, he thought but did not say.