Of Orion, Ovenbirds and Old Route 5

Even without consulting the calendar we know it is mid-September. The night sky is altered: Orion hangs fetchingly over our road at 5 in the morning. The traffic on Old Route 5 is sparse. Most telling, our favourite morning eatery, Jane’s, has switched to autumn hours, no longer availing the depraved eggs-bacon-onion breakfast we both love so well.

On the trail to Dalem Lake it is the time of year when every few footsteps delivers a faceful of spider web. Red maples flaunt the first scarlet leaves that will be legion on Kelly’s Mountain a month from now. The forest is riotous with mushrooms of every hue: brindle, red, purple, yellow, white. Birds no longer sing in the woods but at night, from the sleeping porch, we hear them in the night sky discussing which way to negotiate their perilous journey to Panama or Hispaniola. 

We cross paths with itinerant troupes of warblers intent on getting out of Dodge while the getting is good: magnolias and myrtles, blackburnians and black-and-whites, ovenbirds, parulas. Paying attention, we are occasionally rewarded with a bird out of the ordinary: a migrant rusty blackbird, a member of his clan shyer than his gregarious relatives from the redwinged and Brewer’s branches of the tribe.

We still swim. At Dalem the loons that raised a family this season in Dalem’s marshy edges still yodel their oh-so-Canadian anthem of the northern woods. Curiosity pulls them closer when we’re in the water. What are the strange beasts, they wonder, crooning a song of their own: If you should survive ‘til a hundred and five . . .

Out on the Great Bras d’Or we hear telltale wing-whistles: scoters have returned from their northern breeding grounds, readying for fall and winter. Among the hummingbirds it is the young of the year who are the laggards at the feeder. The rubythroat mums and dads who raised them have already fled for warmer climes. Do we do the youngsters a disservice by continuing to ladle out the sugar water they like so well? 

I look for dead and dying birch and maple to convert to firewood for the Drolet woodstove that provides so much cozy comfort on evenings no longer hot and humid. Pal Derrick organized a posse to help transform his own small mountain of eight-foot cordwood into stacks of stove-length bits. A decade older than most everyone else in the work party, I was intent on not embarrassing myself. Operating a chainsaw for eight hours, I was keen not to flag, not to give near-septuagenarians a bad name. ‘Turns out I didn’t. Afterwards Donna told me that her friends assumed I was an honest-to-goodness lumberjack, a logger. I do not lie.

It took longer this year – is it because we were absent in 2015? – but the snowshoe hares are finally used to us again. They no longer flee when we emerge from the cabin in the morning but remain, ruminating on the nature of things as they carefully chew the grass availed just outside our door. We hope the bunnies will not be dangerously tamed five or six weeks from now when we are replaced by men in plaid jackets carrying shotguns.

Bald eagles were plentiful when we arrived in June then disappeared for the superior fishing offered by the Bird Islands in summer. Now the eagles are back. No matter how compelling the book either of us happens to be reading in the front porch, we pause to look whenever an eagle alights on one of our tall spruces and lingers to study the passing scene.

Only two weeks remain before an historic event unfolds: for the first time ever Jan and I will depart Cape Breton separately this year. I was robbed of my CB time a year ago and aim to make up the loss by remaining here well into October. Jan and Doris – my beloved Mum – are united in a fretful worry: that left to my own devices I will through sheer half-wittedness starve or chainsaw my leg off or burn the cabin down. Oh ye of such little faith, how do they imagine I coped in those antediluvian, pre-Janice days when I did manage to find my way across Old Route 5 without someone to hold my hand?