High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes.  At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds.  A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

*    *    *

A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sudden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of is own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die.  

To what end? Out on the bog a crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly hulk into the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings.  The tamaracks re-echo with his bugled certitude. He seems to know.

Excerpts are from “A Sand County Almanac, with essays on conservation from Round River”, by Aldo Leopold and published by Oxford University Press (1966). For more information about Aldo Leopold, see www.aldoleopold.org. An inexpensive paperback version of Sand County Almanac published by Ballantine Books is widely available at book stores or on-line.