Several mornings a week, to preserve the morning quiet in the house, I go for a three-mile walk. I occasionally get somewhere past walk, maybe all the way to shuffle, rarely do I get to run. Running is done in the afternoons. Morning is to enjoy fog that enhances the quiet of the prairie--unless it is thick enough to cause the boats and ships in the strait to use their fog horns. Mornings are to pause at the now ripened blackberry thickets. We have both three varieties: Pacific, Cutleaf, and Himalayan. They are excellent, straight off the thorny branches or picked to take home and put in a cobbler.

Yesterday's morning quiet was interrupted before I got to the end of the driveway. There was a muted honking--just loud enough to hear above the traffic on the highway a mile away, but quiet enough to tell me they were on the ground. On the ground the geese honk in a half-hearted sort of way, not like in the air when it seems they must constantly reassure one another that everyone is airborne; everyone is flying in the right direction; and it's someone else's turn to lead.

The geese, mostly Canadas, are in the newly mowed barley fields. Where three days ago there was grass with grain-heavy tops waving in the wind, now there are rows of straw and scattered grains of barley. These are the early travelers, probably not from more than a hundred miles north of us. They will stay here a day or two, eat until the morning quiet is shattered with the noise of shotguns. They will lift off in a beauteous state of grace, alarmed honking, and wings pushing hard to escape harm's way. They don't know there is an "early" season. They cannot read. They only know it is time to fly south to more plentiful food.

They are unaware of fall not starting for almost three weeks. Like the whales that come in when without the newspaper editor's permission for violating migration time, the geese cannot read anything we think of as useful material. They 'read' me as I pass the southerly border of the grain field and waddle northerly. If I stop, the honking gets louder. It also changes if I change from walking to running. Surely it is not intentional, but there will be two or three short loud honks--as if to say, "Back to eating. He's running today." In the sense of alertness that paranoia brings, they know someone will be out to get them, but it is not me.

Another "early arriver" is the kestrel perched on a sign post. The local birds will let me get quite close as I cover the route. The travelers want a much larger radius of safety. The kestrel takes flight when I am still thirty or forty yards away. It will hang around the prairie, not waiting for a newspaper's announcement of equinox, simply pausing because there are things to eat here. The prairie will stay warm enough for voles and field mice, small brightly colored snakes, and the many rabbits to be out and about--both to eat and be eaten. Even if they could read, that would not tell them the early travelers are already here.

A somewhat cruel trick of nature awaits on the upper fence. A downy woodpecker is scratching at the ground. Why is it doing that I ask inwardly. Books all say woodpeckers eat bugs and things in trees. This one is scratching at the ground the way the towhees do... hmmm, Okay, fledging just took place. There are a lot of brand new birds out and about learning how to be birds. Their primary learning tool, their book, is their parents. If something happens to the parents, the recently born birds are on their own. All they can do is watch, mimic, hope to find enough food to eat and survive the coming fall. They cannot read my bird books. They can only do what they see other birds doing. I can only hope the young woodpecker flies to the nearby woods where it might see other woodpeckers and quit trying to be a towhee.

As I drop down past the cemetery I am on the opposite side of the field from where I first saw the geese. At the overlook I am about two-hundred yards away. All remains quiet as I sit on the bench--not one honk do I hear until I get up. One honk. I wonder, if I walk away from the field will they be quiet? Just as I am about to start my experiment, two cars pull up and park. Doors slam, geese read the noises as well as I read the news. Honking starts from the barley field. With flights and hops, honks and other noises, the geese move to the far end of the field.

The last half mile to the house is quiet. The geese can see me, but don't care.   Distance makes me harmless.

A long red-tailed hawk is on a nearby fence post. What can it possibly read from such a low vantage point? Oh, the first picking of squash took place yesterday and the ground between the rows of plants has been bared by the tractor and sledge. The ground-dwelling animals are much more visible than day before yesterday. My eyes are old and probably unseeing when compared to the hawk's keen vision. In their world of illiteracy of our written words I am illiterate, barely seeing as I pass.

Nice read, John.  Thanks, as always, for sharing.