Interval

I had been walking along the Moose Lake road for an hour, an hour of dodging the great logging trucks on the way to the camps south of town. Time and again, I had been forced to walk in the soft snow of the shoulder until at last, I gave up entirely trying to follow the open road itself. Each time a truck roared by, the air was white with snow dust and putrid with the smell of burned gasoline and oil. No sooner had I recovered my equilibrium than another would come hurtling down the highway and I began to despair of knowing a single undisturbed moment or enjoying at all what I had really come to see and hear.

It was late afternoon and through the birches and banks of balsam was the afterglow of sunset. Overhead were lingering wisps of pink extending clear to the dusky blue of the horizon. All these things I noticed in spite of the trucks, and there were other things, too: the fact that it was warm for February, there was no wind, and that water had seeped during midday into puddles in the center of the road. But as I walked along, I felt more than saw these things, snatched at them as it were with the senses I had left between the onslaughts of traffic.

And then, while bemoaning my fate at having been born in an age of traffic and speed, I suddenly realized that the trucks had stopped and that it was quiet again, that there were no foreign smells, and that while I had hoped, my wish had been granted. Quickly, I stepped off the shoulder onto the smooth bareness of the road and strode along as softly as though the moment might be taken from me, as though I had no right to enjoy without interruption. For a time, I was skeptical of my good fortune and expected with every breath to hear the old familiar, shattering roar.

Then gradually I began to smell the trees and the freezing wetness in the center of the road and it was so quiet that I found myself skirting cautiously the newly forming crust of ice so I would not crunch it as I stepped. Then, when I was sure the respite was real and lasting, I stopped dead and stood there listening for what the woods might bring.

I had not long to wait, for over the darkening hills came the note of a great horned owl, hoo - hoooo - hoo - hoooooooo -- and an answering note much deeper and more resonant than the first, hoo - hooooo - hoo - hooooooooooo. Back and forth went the booming, haunting calls of Bufo virginianus, and with them went the fear of death to the cowering snowshoe hares in the alder swamps, to the budding partridge in the groves of aspen, to countless waiting birds and animals for miles around. That call was the most feared hunting call in the wild. It came again and again and for the moment I was far from the road, and trucks and civilization itself were forgotten. As I listened, a swift vision came to me of big timber and miles of wilderness, lonely valleys bathed in moonlight, rivers and lakeshores where there were still no sounds but those of the wild.

Then I was conscious of a sound as of a great wind coming out of the north, as though a storm was breaking over the country that might tear every tree from its roots, and at that moment the calling of the horned owls stopped. The sound of storm increased until it seemed as though it would engulf me and every living thing on earth. Blinding lights burst over the hill behind me and a hurricane of shrieking metal roared out of the night. Desperately, I sprang for the side of the road as an empty truck sped by. The interval was over.