De Fenestra

Mammals: juvenile Uinta ground squirrel; bison; pronghorn antelope; beaver; one deer on Grassy Island who gave zero shits about humans.

Birds: raven; magpie; osprey; bald eagle; mountain bluebird; sandhill crane; common merganser; black-necked stilt; kingfisher. Also great-tailed grackle while transferring through the DFW airport.

I leave the office a few minutes after 5:00 to tentative clouds and an anomalous 64º. A detour is mandatory: same road as two weeks ago. Bending the Subaru through the corkscrew, I feel the tires skitter on an overabundance of salt remaining from the last snow. I'm surprised the road crews treated that back road at all - horse money at work, I suppose.

A half-second later, as I'm accelerating out of the right-hand half of the corkscrew, a sharp-edged flash of cream and russet catches my eye. Above the hillside to my left, a red-tailed hawk spreads his wings and pulls out of a dive, clawing into a tight ninety-degree bank that silhouettes him against a perfect evening sky.

This road's trying to tell me something but I'm afraid I'm not quite parsing the message yet.