Like some mountain man who’s happy in his holler, I’m happy to live up Moses Creek. It’s the right place to read, write and ramble in the woods around our house — the 3Rs of retirement for me. But sometimes, days having passed, and wondering how the water flows, I’ll drive down the creek to the Tuckasegee River, where the valley opens up and traffic rushes past, and looking around, I’ll think, “So, this is the world!” 

Before Becky and I retired up Moses Creek, I made my living as a backpack and canoe guide here in the Blue Ridge and in other parts of the country.

Birds were little more than nondescript flitting things to me that afternoon in January 1973, when I lay down on my bunk to sleep. It was on the second floor of a rundown WWII barracks at a Marine Corps airbase in southern California. I needed sleep because I worked nights in the base’s cavernous warehouse, Building 313, where my job was to find whatever parts the flightline mechanics needed to keep jet fighters and other military “birds” ready to bomb and strafe. But that afternoon not jet roars but soft, high-pitched, beckoning whistles came through the open door at the end of the barracks and woke me up. I walked out onto the stairway landing.

The day dawned clear, and I was standing on the ridge behind our house looking west and waiting for the mountains to turn rosy in the rising sun, when I heard the high-pitched clucks of a pileated woodpecker winging toward me.

A mole tunneled out of the woods early this winter and started digging back and forth behind the house in a never-ending search for food. In two months it has turned our yard into a scale model of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Walk across the grass and your feet sink into newly pushed up earth. 

I had read in natural history books about white-tailed deer that during the fall rut, deer hunters have sometimes been seriously injured when their prey — bucks hyped up to mate, and brooking no rivals — turned the tables on them and attacked. “A buck in the rut is always spoiling for a fight,” is the way one naturalist puts it.

To my eyes it was as magnificent a tree as could be found in Western North Carolina — an eastern hemlock near Dismal Falls, on the flank of Big Pisgah Mountain.

The first time we saw the skunk, Becky and I were in the yard after supper throwing a frisbee. It’s something we started doing at the start of the COVID pandemic as a relaxing way to end still another shut-in day. Becky pointed, I turned — and there was “Mr. Plume.” He was 30 feet away eating seeds that had fallen to the ground under the birdfeeder. We watched him for awhile, admiring his pure white stripes and fluffy tail. Then, seeing that all he wanted to do was eat, we went back to throwing the frisbee.

I’d been sprayed once years earlier, so yesterday morning I knew what might happen when, standing on the ridge above our house, I turned and saw the skunk.

The sight of a fox standing in the yard would not have made my eyes open any wider that morning than the two brown thrashers did when I saw them out the window.