At dawn, the elk were still here.
They arrived sometime around ten-thirty last night, their hooves crackling through snow hardened by temperatures nearing single digits, and wind chills already below zero. For such large animals, they are remarkably quiet, and just as remarkably invisible in the dark . . . at least until one’s eyes adjust to the absence of light.
They come at times like this, when the cold is deep and sustenance is scarce. The latter is a more common problem year-round now, given the drought, but in warmer weather, they can always find forage up in the mountains. Now, it’s not just food scarcity but also lack of water that drives them down toward human habitation in the darker hours, down to this one space they have come to know as refuge, sanctuary.
It’s rare, though, to see them trust enough to remain here in the daylight. But as the remnant clouds began to part across a pale coral sky, they were still here: a few still feeding, some young bucks playing, one on the ground resting, and the rest seemingly taking the ruminant’s approach to hanging out, as though the stacked bales were nothing more than a gossipy water cooler for the antlered set.
It’s a gift, every time they appear — this humbling realization that over the last dozen or so years, as colonialism’s encroachments have increasingly demolished their natural environment around them, they have come to place sufficient trust in us to treat this small place as their safe space. We keep our distance, and they keep theirs, although they and the horses are interested in each other, as though recognizing a kinship of sorts. It keeps them off the highway and out of the sights of poachers, allows them feed and to drink enough fresh water to survive another day, week, month, season.
Their arrival is part of the medicine of winter, too: an indigenous presence whose persevering survival is a sign of this habitat’s health, of an ecosystem in at least some sort of balance. And now, in these terrible deadly days of seemingly endless drought, of equally endless pandemic, of the evils of colonialism come home to roost en masse, the health and harmony of the land is a sign of the medicine at winter’s heart.
Of course, the essence of that medicine is the snow — water, fallen from the heart of season and sky, frozen into its own array of hearts on the surface of the ground, beckoning the hearts of the land’s other children to come and make use of it, to come and survive.
It’s an image made tangible in the subject of today’s photo meditation, one for the Monday prior to the outside world’s red-letter day for love. A week from today, the atmosphere will be one of hearts, yes, of flowers and candy and jewels and other tokens of romantic affection.
Here, the signs and signifiers of love run much deeper.
They are more subtle, too: a failure to notice when they choose to present themselves usually means that one will miss out on their expression entirely. But if there is one thing that belonging to this land has taught Wings, it’s to notice, to look, to be aware of what earth and sky, weather and season offer us as gifts.
As medicine.
He captured this image in digital format almost exactly a dozen years ago: near January’s end, in 2010. Back then, we still got real snow in the winter, the kind of fall routinely measured in feet that promptly froze solid for the next three weeks. And sometimes, its freezing patterns were something more than mere drift and rime.
Hearts.
There are several of them visible in the snow in the photo above, but you have to know to look for them. He saw it instantly, on the ground, and memorialized it. When he showed me the photos he’d taken that day, he said nothing at first, waiting to see if I would see what he saw.
I did.
And it’s become a favorite image since.
It’s a reminder, too, of old teachings, of essential truths that colonialism would have us unlearn in its service. Like the snow, like the arrival of the elk, like the season and the snow, like the medicine at winter’s heart — there is harmony in our world still, and there is love. We just have to know to look for it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
