Now is the season of hungry mice, cold rabbits, lean owls hunkering with their lamp-eyes in the leafless lanes in the needled dark; now is the season when the kittle fox comes to town in the blue valley of early morning; now is the season of iron rivers, bloody crossings, flaring winds, birds frozen in their tents of weeds, their music spent and blown like smoke to the stone of the sky; now is the season of the hunter Death; with his belt of knives, his black snowshoes, he means to cleanse the earth of fat; his gray shadows are out and running – under the moon, the pines, down snow-filled trails they carry the red whips of their music, their footfalls quick as hammers, from cabin to cabin, from bed to bed, from dreamer to dreamer.
