It is one of those sharp and glistening winter days where you feel like you�re living inside of a diamond looking out. The weather is still cold enough to strike fear into the hearts of southerners, but to those of us reared on Midwestern winters, it is merely winter. It has warmed past the point of remark. I decided that it was time for a walk. I pulled on my fake fur cap, my enormous cherry red down jacket with the fake fur collar, my shearling mittens and my new boots, also lined with fake fur, plush and warm and not yet tamped down by many days of use.

I skidded up the driveway and the uphill road and plunged into the nature preserve trail. The preserve is full of tracks, none of them human, save for my own set from a few days ago when it was snowing so hard that I couldn�t tell wear the trails were. My old tracks have lost their edge to fresh snow. They now look more like filigree, an ornamental design on the edge of a pure white cake. I followed the main trail, now clearly marked by the hoofprints of deer and the wide pawprints of coyote, over the footbridges, along the narrow stream where a flock of robins bathed and drank, and out into the small park by the pond of a hundred ducks. The ducks, thinking I had food for them, set to making a colossal noise and began hopping out onto the flattened snow at their pond�s edge. But I turned my back on them and headed toward the river by way of the streamside trail.

The snow was more than a foot deep. I blazed my own trail, avoiding the crusted over paths of the deer, which were harder to navigate. I emerged from the trees by the large pond, which was criss-crossed with the tracks of deer, foxes, rabbits, birds and squirrels. It is at this point in my walk that I became aware of how obsessed I have become with tracks.

As a kid growing up in a city, I remember staring in fascination at the pages in my Girl Scout manual discussing track identification. I�ve always loved trying to figure out what has happened in the woods before I�ve arrived by looking at the tracks. There is the spot where two squirrels chased each other around a tree. There is the spot where the coyote slipped under the fence � see the fur caught on the nail protruding from the broken slat? This is the first time I�ve had a chance to put my arcane knowledge to use.

As I neared the river, it sounded as if I was approaching the highway. The snowmobiles are out early at this time of year. They know their days are numbered. I made a plan to walk out on the frozen river to the park where I run in the spring when the steep trails are not glazed with ice. It is not a long walk, and I�ve always wondered exactly how far it is when you don�t have to follow the road. I decided to venture out by the dock. As I approached the frozen river, the snowmobiles cleared and all was quiet. I grabbed onto the pylon and stepped onto the water. The snowdrifts were up to my thighs. Someone had swept the dock onto the ice. But as I moved slowly forward and out onto the nearest set of snowmobile trails, the walking became easier. I walked out to the middle of the river. The shimmering ice stretched as far as I could see in both directions. I began walking toward the park.

In the early morning quiet on the vast stretch of ice blurred at the edges with blowing snow, I felt like I was walking in a desert. It was lonely and a little disconcerting. As I rounded the first private pier past the one I�d walked in from, I noticed that the ice underneath it was grey and wet � melted. It made me a little nervous, but I kept walking a little further until I heard the ice pop. I tried to talk myself forward. �You are much lighter than a snowmobile. It has been below twenty for weeks. You can do it.� But then I thought about the physics of snowmobiles, how they hum along like bees, never stopping in a single spot to see if the ice would crack. I turned around. After I stepped back to shore, I walked out to the end of the pier and looked back at my tracks, glittering like dark jewels in the morning sun. In the distance, I could see a tiny red pinprick, then a yellow one, followed by a growing hum. More snowmobiles, going probably ninety miles an hour. I turned around and headed for home.

Heading back, I took the uphill road past the empty pool and around by the back entrance to the barn. There is a trail along the side of the paddock that runs on the far side of the stream behind our house. I love walking this way in the winter especially because it always smells like hay. I like the contrast of standing knee-deep in snow and smelling the summer hay. I crossed the frozen stream into our backyard, which since yesterday�s snow, has been reborn as virgin territory. That�s what I love about winter: every time it snows, you have another chance to be the first person in the world.

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