Exhilarating

It was late in the afternoon before I got the itch to get out in the woods and cover some ground. I knew they would lock the gates of the nature preserve at 6 and I didn't take off from home until 4:30. So, I parked in a tractor field entrance down the road and walked into the preserve. I planned to make the whole loop and I was only about half way through the preserve when the sun started going down. The temperature was in the 20's. I thought about how cold it was and how all the animals were probably holed up trying to stay warm. The only thing that I'd seen moving were a pair of flickers in the distance, and a hawk screeing far overhead. It was so cold that I couldn't enjoy the usual loamy smell of the woods and even though I'd hiked these trails many times and was familiar with the park, the darkness started me making me feel apprehensive. I noticed I started to walk as if I were blind, lifting my toes with each step. I was on the higher dunes trail when I kicked out a small herd of deer. They bolted across the trail right in front of me! A little further down the trail I looked up just in time to see an owl gliding through the trees and listened to the hooting fade into the gloom. The rest of the hike was in virtual darkness. I wasn't sure that I'd be able to find my way on the less traveled portions of the trail since they were so leaf covered, but even in the dark the trail was still visible. I started hearing more and more animals stirring in the undergrowth to either side of me. For comfort I checked that I had my headlamp still safely tucked in my pocket. It crossed my mind that if I twisted my ankle I'd have a really rough time getting back to my car, not to mention that it has a manual transmission. I also remembered Stuart telling me that a buck would charge out of sheer testosterone overload during rut. The hardest part of navigating in the dark was the short distance that I had to walk along the road, blinded by headlights. It's wasn't the sort of hike that I'd want to take all the time, but it was an adventure just to hear the nocturnal awakening.