We are all oracles now here at the end of winter. We look out our windows, go for walks, step gingerly through the still deep snow looking for the signs, trying to divine spring’s arrival. We have many methods for this divination. We look to the bird feeder and wait eagerly for the first sighting of the robin. Some of us are lucky enough to live where snowdrops bloom. We listen for the trickle of sap from the maples. So many little “sure signs” followed inevitably by another blizzard, a freeze, and more shoveling. False starts and dashed hope. There is one sign however that always proves you have turned the corner, that the good green pattern is on the move and will not be denied.
Blood.
A drop by the cellar door where the house cat cornered a mouse, an imprint of a raptor’s wings in the snow, a leg or rib bone in the far field left after the coyotes’ grim revelry. As the days warm and the snow softens, both prey and predator are about and they are both desperate with hunger after a long winter. This desperation moves them in, from the forest to the edge, from the edge to the garden, from the garden to the back door. We too are hungry, desperate, and out for blood—just in a different way.
We passed St. Brigid’s day and became closer to the spring equinox than the winter solstice nearly a month ago now. The progression of the calendar is evident; the nights ease their bite and the forest turns feral. Owls drop silent from the white pines, talons snagging mice careless enough to scurry through the melting edges of the field. Coyotes, lean from winter, circle lame deer in the briar. By the chicken coop, my cat will soon stalk voles flushed from collapsing snow tunnels and leave a droplet of blood staining the stoop. This is spring’s truth: blood, not buds, heralds the true waning of winter. The animals, starved through the dark months, grow reckless now. Look at your bird feeder or compost pile at night to see a skunk sniff the fallen seed, hear the foxes at the woodline, look to the sky for hen-hungry hawks. We like to imagine a quiet, gentle greening but it is more of a violent rebirth followed by maw-red hunger. The dogwood is a hearty crimson now, foreshadowing the quickening hunts to come, an undeniable sign that life is fighting back against winter, spilling red to claim the season. Out here in our fields and forests, spring bleeds before it blooms.
We feel it as well, that stirring under the skin as water rushes along the roads and our own pulses quicken. Like the predators waking to spring’s call, we are out for blood.
Our own.
We remain focused and hunt down our own inadequacies. Perhaps this looks like following through with the resolutions we scribbled down in January, prey we track over March’s rivulets and thawing fields. Perhaps you are a Christian entering Lent, relentlessly hunting down your own sin and feeling the season’s hunger as you begin your fast. Whatever the case may be, this is not the time for idle Romantic renewal, no time to gently twirl our hair and wait for the daffodils to bloom; it is a hunt, a season to shed what no longer serves us so that we may become stronger both physically and spiritually. We are not so different from the denizens of the forests with their fangs and claws; hunger drives us to devour our own weakness and grow new muscle, sinew, flesh.
The owl’s talons and our resolve strike with the same precision: swift, secret, red. Coyotes rip through deer with pack ferocity just as we tear at old habits with a unshakeable will. The season binds us to these predators in a shared hunt, their blood literal, ours (mostly) symbolic, both spilling to awake that good green pattern beneath the snow. The animals are desperate; winter thinned them, left them hollow. So too we, starved by months of stagnation, are eager to stop preparing and finally lunge. A fox’s kill at the woodline mirrors a resolution reclaimed, a hawk’s dive shadows a sin overcome, the pack encircling lame prey evokes an inadequacy replaced with strength. This time last year, I wrote that belonging to a place means knowing where the water on your land runs, where it pools, where it ultimately falls. The same can be said of our own blood; how we move through the season, where we risk stagnating, where we ultimately fall.
Blood heralds spring on the land and in our hearts. It is a crimson thread tying us to the owls, the coy dogs, and even the cat by the barn. It is the first drop, the red proclamation of winter’s end. We are not so different from those predators at the woodline. Hunters all, the warm, moist air full of field-melt fills our lungs and quickens our good hearts. What happens next depends on the predator. Out there in the fields and hedgerows, it is a mouse’s end or a deer’s last stagger. In us however, it it is doubt slain, weakness consumed, strength of soul and body generated. Spring is no gentle gift; it is a call to kill what holds us back and demand something deeper of ourselves. In the briars of our hearts and in our marrow, we track our prey.
We are out for blood.
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