Palimpsest landscapes

 

From the last half of January until the middle of this week, my native village has been held in the grip of temperatures between -10 and -16. This has been a period of no new precipitation and stable conditions, without any significant fluctuations in the weather. This stability has allowed most of the lakes and waterways to freeze solidly and thus allowed various animals to use them as thoroughfares. Mostly, these wanderings happen at night, and we are left with the various tracks and spoors in the morning, providing a detailed and legible chronicle of the past night to whomever chooses to go onto the ice and enter into this quiet world so teeming with half-visible life. 

Since no new snow has fallen, the old tracks do not get covered but collapse slowly, taking enough time for new tracks to be placed around them, which in turn allows us to extract a tenuous and vague chronology of our nightly neighbours. In this period, my family and I have explored several sections of some of the lakes and rivers closest to us, and these journeys have revealed to us landscapes where tracks old and new are scribbled across the snow in a continuous and poorly executed palimpsest. In some cases, we have been able to keep an eye on the changes, and note where new tracks have been added, while in other cases we see how the scribbles intertwine and erase the previous layer. This has been a perennial source of joy throughout the past month, and below are some examples from the palimpsest landscapes of the village, in which we see that although the valleys and riverbanks seem uninhabited from a distance, this is merely an illusion.  

Two foxes

The tracks of my kicksled to the left, foxes to the right

Tracks from a dancing crow, crossed by the tracks of a fox

Mostly hares, with the occasional fox

Tracks showing the stage for a boxing match between two hares

Tracks of a hare crossed by a fox

The slide of an otter, crossed by the tracks of a fox