Unfinished Stories

Nature's stories unfurl at their own pace, or sometimes not at all.

A little walk on the beach, that’s all it was supposed to be, just an hour or so to see what the ice was doing on Little Sand Bay. But that was three hours ago. We are still there, snared by the threads of a story unfolding right before our eyes, a stand off occurring on the edge of the ice, a slow motion dance with no end in sight but we cannot look away.

Little Sand Bay in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore can be a kaleidoscope of ice, a place where the currents and the winds swirl winter in an infinite array of patterns. Jill and I had come to walk the beach, listen to the chatter and clatter of the ice sheets moving on the swells, a sound like the lake breathing. But now we were ready to go home. Jill already in the car. I was just a few yards behind topping the rise, when I glanced up one more time and saw something on the ice further down the beach.

Two somethings actually, moving, almost out of camera range but close enough for a glimpse in the binoculars — a lone deer standing tensed as a bow on the edge of the ice, and a coyote weaving and dodging in and out, orbiting, prodding, testing, taking the measure of the frightened doe.

Both deer and coyote are common in the Apostle Islands and in northern Wisconsin. Most often it is the slings and arrows of the coyote’s high-pitched chorus unseen from the forest edge after sunset, or the heart-shaped tracks of deer making strings of Valentines in the wet sand at the water’s edge. But this encounter felt different. There was a sharpness to it. The thread of a story was unraveling before our eyes.

Repeatedly, a coyote with a coat the color of November leaves, would venture out from the forested edge, approach the deer with the arrowhead of its nose, closer, and closer until the doe would finally stand, facing it stiff-legged and tensed. Their eyes locked in what author Barry Lopez once called “a conversation of death,” a look between predator and prey, sizing each other up, taking measure of the chance for escape, the chance for a kill.

It was a precarious spot for the deer - caught out on the shelf of ice between the lake and the steep clay banks — and the coyote seemed to sense it. While coyotes do take a toll on fawns in the spring and, as a pack can bring down an injured or sick deer, or one caught in deep snow, the hooves of an adult deer on good footing can slash and stomp viciously making it difficult prey for a lone coyote.

And so they tested. The coyote circling, inching closer, until the deer would stamp her hooves, the coyote leaping backwards out of range, and then slinking off again into the trees, out of the wind to wait. The doe would stand guard for a time, and then lie down on the exposed ice, licking its back leg repeatedly as if soothing a wound, and the wait would begin again.

It was slow dance. Nature is filled with little dramas that take place mostly unseen, each moment filled with thousands of story threads all in different phases of playing out. A track in the mud may be from a mouse seconds away from being snared in the talons of a hawk. A feather on the beach may be the exclamation point of a flicker taken apart hours ago by a merlin. The book of nature doesn’t read like nature literature, each story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, all neatly tied up by the end of a chapter. Nature moves at a pace untethered to human schedules, not concerned whether you are cold or hungry or have somewhere else to go. It does not subscribe to our own sense of self-importance. If we want to witness the stories, we must be willing to submit to it, and to wait.

And so we did.

Ravens began to appear, first circling like windblown ashes, and then landing in the crown of a big white pine to watch, the sound of their calls like fingernails scratching on a blackboard. One brave bird swooped right down to the ice, landing almost on the haunches of the resting deer, pecked at something in the ice, and then flapped off cawing loudly as if it had taken a dare.

In his writings, my friend and cultural anthropologist Richard K. Nelson who spent decades living among the Koyukon people in Alaska, often spoke of ravens leading wolves or human hunters to a potential kill. Was this a kind of interspecies cooperation, ravens and coyotes acting as a team, or an act of self-interest perhaps with the ravens only hoping for some of the scrapes of the left-over carcass? Nelson did not claim to have the answer but, as he wrote in his book The Island Within “There is power in this world and it is best to acknowledge that and act accordingly.”

And so we watched.

An hour passed. Then two. The cold seeped through our clothing, chilling us. We hadn’t brought food or water since this was only meant to be a short walk, the hours leaving us hungry and thirsty, and cold. Yet the story seemed to be no closer to whatever conclusion it would come to. We called our friend Mike who brought food and water and joined the watch. And still we waited.

Finally, the coyote appeared again, this time far down the shoreline towards Point Detour. With a sort of nonchalance, it began moving slowly towards the resting doe from downwind. Closer and closer, angling, stopping and starting, retreating and edging closer again. At first, the doe seemed to take no notice, or perhaps did not scent the coyote approaching.

Then there was a change in the air, something sharpened as if this would be the moment, one way or another. The doe stood, rigid, ears cupped towards the coyote now only yards away, untangling the breeze to catch its scent. The doe turned and it began walking.

Directly towards us.

We crouched behind a spindly set of birch trunks and watched as the doe came within just a few yards - the coyote still coming down the beach, the doe caught for a moment between.

It clamored up the bank, moving it seemed to me awkwardly as if injured …

… stopped to take one more look at us, or perhaps check for the coyote which had now vanished from the beach.

And bounded off into the forest.

We watched her go, her tail raised as if a comma in a story that would have no ending, at least on this day.

Some stories are like that, as much as we would want them to be otherwise.

And so with the deer and the coyote gone from sight, Jill and Mike left to warm up, and I retreated to the beach to look for tracks, to watch the sun set, hoping to bring an end to at least one story, the story of a winter’s walk on the beach to look for ice.

— Jeff Rennicke