Around five that morning, the forest began to awaken. A symphony of pinks, oranges and yellows orchestrated their way over the blue-black horizon. Jays, crows, warblers, chickadees and waxwings (nature’s most insistent alarm clocks) created a raucous musical score of whoops, whistles, caws, squawks, chirps, and screeches—while the woodpeckers added their oddly syncopated percussion.

I crawled out of my tent to join the emerging day.

Still groggy, despite these insistent wake-up cries, I managed to stumble over to my backpack, rummage through it, and finally locate my water filter. Gingerly, I climbed down from the penthouse of my boulder to the lakeshore below. I knelt down and absentmindedly began my routine of filtering water for the day. Apparently satisfied that they had awakened the whole of nature, the birds were now hushed, and aside from the occasional call of a loon echoing across the lake, all was quiet. Mist-laden shafts of sunlight, chasing the chill from the air and foretelling a brilliant day, pierced the lengthy early morning shadows of balsam and spruce.

Suddenly this tranquility was jolted by the cacophonous sound of galumphing hooves not fifty feet away, on a patch of meadow that lay across a little cove from where I huddled on the shore. There, cavorting like thousand-pound nymphs from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were a bull moose and the cow he was obviously attempting to impress. I stopped my labors, afraid that my presence might be discovered, and watched in awe as these two giants engaged in their morning frolic—kicking up their heels and dipping their heads while circling round and round. Recalling that morning, in my present vocation as wilderness photographer, I might curse myself for not having my camera at my side—ever ready to record the unheralded moment. But at that time I was blissfully unaware of treating this event as a photo op. I simply sat quiet as a stone and treasured this early morning ballet. Eventually, the frolickers retired to the forest and I returned with renewed spirit to my task.

Copyright © 2021 by Dick Anderson