Musky the Muskrat

In years past, Musky the muskrat would rapidly swim in the opposite direction if he saw me, but yesterday he changed course, circling the cove to swim closer. When I clicked my tongue as if I were calling a dog, he swam directly toward me -- maybe three feet from shore -- then stopped. When I took a step closer, he slapped his tail as a warning and started to swim away until I clicked my tongue again, causing him to circle back. Has someone been feeding Musky the muskrat? I think he was looking for a handout.

Ice Thunder

I confess to having read Thoreau's WALDEN POND at an impressionable age, so when I heard ice thunder on Mohican Lake I had some vague knowledge of it. That may not describe the sound exactly, though it vibrates the ribcage the same way a deep clap of thunder does. Maybe "boom" or "resonant crack" expresses it better.

However, no description can convey the way it startles. From the living room it sounded as if something had knocked the house off its foundation.

I kept hearing it, too, so I went outside to listen. Sometimes the boom would start across the lake, sounding ever louder at irregular intervals until it reached the cove. Then it seemed to start in the cove, and roll to the opposite side. At other times I'd hear a single boom.

I assume I heard it because the lake had no snow cover. I don't remember hearing it the winter before when snow covered the ice, and I haven't heard it since a snowstorm blanketed the ice in February.

When I examined the ice, I noticed cracks of various lengths and depths, with some cracks seeming to run the full thickness of the ice, from 8-12 inches, according to an ice fisherman who'd drilled holes in several places. The boom probably occurs at the moment of cracking, or perhaps when these cracked sections of ice rub against or collide into each other.

Expansion and contraction must be the root cause of it. If you were to put a glass of water in the freezer, the water would freeze, expand and break the glass. Wind also might play a part. It seemed loudest during a very windy two day period.

A walk in Central Park that same week further illuminated the mystery. Ice on the pond by Bathesda Fountain had heaved, due to expansion, onto the concrete steps.

Thoreau's observations also help. Here's how he described hearing it on Walden Pond:

"The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube."

Spider and Ice

A thin layer of ice covered the lake, so I walked out on my dock and, just for fun, rocked it back and forth, heaving the water in waves across the cove and breaking the ice into thin, transparent chunks. I picked some of them out of the water with my bare hands and flung them across the ice where they shattered in a thousand pieces.

The next day I thought I'd do the same thing only the ice was much thicker. We'd had a bitter cold night. From the dock, I noticed what I thought was a piece of lake weed suspended in the ice. As I examined it, I realized it was, in fact, a spider. And the spider seemed to be located underneath a broken slab of ice that somehow had slid under the existing ice in yesterday’s forceful rocking.

I thought it might be interesting to remove the spider, so I began to knock a hole in the ice with a stick. As soon as I did the spider moved. This shocked me. I guessed the spider to be frozen in the ice. Instead, it walked upside down along the bottom of the ice, at first away from the vibration, and then toward the hole and to its freedom.

I looked closely at the spider while it remained under the ice. Its body was translucent and fairly sizeable, and it seemed to have many tiny air bubbles trapped in its legs and abdomen. I figured that the spider had stayed alive using this trapped air.

I continued knocking around the spider and finally brought out a chuck of ice with the spider clinging to the underside of it. Immediately its body color darkened, then very slowly this furry, one-and-a-half inch hunting spider began to crawl toward the underside of the dock from where it must have dislodged the day before.

What a will to survive! It had spent nearly 16 hours upside down under ice.

Bald Eagle

Get this. It’s a Wednesday, about 3 in the afternoon. I’m a short 120 miles from the largest metropolis in the United States, in a row boat in the middle of a lake almost two miles long and a half mile wide. The temperature’s about 80, and I’m being pushed along by a warm wind. There’s not another boat on the lake. How is that possible?

I look back to my side of the lake, the western side, where cottages dot the shore. I see no one. I look easterly and see a pristine stretch of pine and swamp oak, and try to seek out the log that I think an eagle landed on the day before. I have to find out if the eagle that I saw from my picture window did indeed catch a fish in the middle of Mohican Lake.

It seems funny that two days before I was fighting the mobs on the subway to get to Penn Station, and pushing through those crowds to get a train to upstate New York. But every week up here I can count on at least one unforgettable encounter with nature, whether it's of a wasp carrying off a hunting spider, or of a pair of otters swimming in the cove.

Yesterday, it was the eagle, which I saw skimming the lake surface and flying to the log. Then, using a pair of binoculars, I tried to see if it were tearing into prey. Crows kept diving at it. I could hear them screeching even a half mile across the lake. But that’s not unusual. Whenever I’ve seen an eagle, I’ve almost always seen some other bird or birds driving it away. Birds as big as crows or as small as sparrows have serious issues with eagles. Then I thought that perhaps the scavenging crows were trying to drive the eagle from its prey, but after the eagle flew off and out of range, I didn’t see crows on the log.

So what happened? Had baldy caught a fish? That's what I mean to find out. I row closer, and see the sun glint off something shiny at the spot where I'm sure he fed. And I'm right, as evidenced by a pile of fish scales on the fore end of a waterlogged trunk of a pine.