In 1979-80 I lived with Harriett in a rural area of the Eastern Townships. All together, our menagerie had 10 cats, four dogs, two parrots, a tortoise, a turtle and a lizard. One of the dogs, Bisky, had been a bit old even when we got him, but Harriet had known him -- and his owner, Mr Turcotte -- for years and when the old man died, it was natural that he ended up on our porch.

It was raining when I woke one day, a warm and gentle rain that didn't beat harshly on the window glass, but melted into the unresisting air so that the smell of the morning was as heavy and sweet as the breath of ruminating cows. By the time I came down to breakfast,, the rain was done and the brown clouds were passing, leaving behind them a blue mesh of sky with the last cloud tendrils swaying dimly over it. I went to the back door and stood there for a moment, listening to the roundelay of horned larks on the distant fields.

It had been a dour and ugly winter, prolonging its intemperance almost until this hour, and giving way to spring with a sullen reluctance. The days had been cold and leaden and the wet winds of March had smacked of the charnel house. Now they were past. I stood on the doorstep and felt the remembered sun, heard the gibbering of the freshet, watched little deltas of yellow mud form along the gutters, and smelled the sensual essence rusing from the warming soil.

Bisky came to the door behind me. I turned and looked at him and time jumped suddenly and I saw that he was old. I put my hand on his grizzled muzzle and sgiik it gently.

"Spring's here, old friend," I tild him. "And who knows, maybe the ducks have started coming back home already."

He wagged his tail once and then moved stiffly by me, his nostrils wrinkling as he tested the fleeting breeze. The winter past had been the longest he had known with us. Through the short-clipped days of it he had lain dreaming by the fire. Little half-heard whimpers had stirred his drawn lips as he journeyed into time in the sole direction that remained open to him. He had dreamed the bitter days away, content to sleep.

As I sat down to breakfast, I glanced out the kitchen window and I could see him moving slowly down the road toward the pond. I knew that he had gone to see about those ducks, and when the meal was done I put on my rubber boots, picked up my field glasses and followed after.

The country road was silver with runnels of thaw water, and bronzed by the sliding ridges of the melting ruts. There was no other wanderer on that road, yet I wasn't alone, for his tracks went with me, each paw-print as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew each thing that he'd done, each move that he'd made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.

The tracks meandered crabwise to and fro across the road. I saw where he had come to the old TRESPASSERS FORBIDDEN sign, which had leaned against the flank of a supporting snowdrift all the winter through, but now was heeling over to a crazy angle, one jagged end tipped accusing to the sky, where flocks of juncos bounded cleanly over and ignored its weary threat. The tracks stopped here, and I knew that he'd stood for a long time, his old nose working as he untangled the identities of the many foxes, farm dogs and hounds which had come this way during the winter months.

We went on then, the tracks and I, over the old corduroy and across the log bridge, to pause for a moment where a torpid garter snake had undulated slowly through the softening mud. There Bisky had left the road and turned into the fallow fields, pausing here and there to sniff at an old cow flap, or at the collapsing burrows left by the field mice underneath the vanished snow.

So we came at last to the beech woods and passed under the red tracery of budding branches where a squirrel jabbered its defiance at the unheeding back of a horned owl, brooding somberly over her white eggs.

The pond lay near at hand. I stopped and sat on an upturned stump and let the sun beat down on me while I swept the surface of the water. I could see no ducks, yet I knew they were there. Back in the yellow cattails, old GreenNose and his mate were waiting patiently for me to go so that they could resume their ponderous courtship. I smiled, knowing that they would not long be left in peace, even in their secluded place.

I waited and the first bee flew by, and little drifting whorls of mist rose from the remaining banks of snow deep in the woods. Then suddenly there was the familiar voice raising in wild yelping somewhere among the dead cattails. And then a frantic surge of wings and old GreenNose lifted out of the reeds, his mate behind him. They circled heavily while, unseen, beneath them, Bisky plunged among the tangled reeds and knew a fragment of the ecstasy that had been his when rabbits had spun through the ponds in other years.

I rose and ambled on until I found his tracks again, beyond the reeds. The trail led to the tamarack swamp and I saw where he had stopped a moment to snuffle at the still-unopened door of a chipmunk's burrow. Nearby there was a cedar tangle and the tracks went round and round beneath the boughs where a ruffed grouse had spent the night.

We crossed the clearing, Bisky and I, and here the soft black mold was churned and tpssed as if by a herd of rutting deer; yet all the tracks were his. For an instant I was baffled, and then a butterfly came through the clearing on unsteady wings, and I remembered. So many times I'd watched him leap, and hop, and circle after such a one, forever led and mocked by the first spring butterflies. Now the track led me beyond the swamp to the edge of a broad field and here they hesitated by a groundhog's hole, unused these two years past. But there was still some failt remaining odor, enough to make Bisky's bulbous muzzle wrinkle with interest, and enough to set his blunt old claws to scratching in the matted grass.

He didn't tarry long. A rabbit passed and the morning breeze carried its scent. Bisky's trail veered off abruptly, careening recklessly across the soft and yiendling furrows of October's plow, slippling and sliding in the frost-slimed troughs. I followed more sedately until the tracks halted abruptly against a bramble patch. He hadn't stopped in time. The thorns still held a tuft or two of his proud plumes.

And then there must have been a new scent on the wind. His tracks moved off in a straight line toward the country road, and the farwhich lie beyond it. There was a new mood on him, the ultimate spring mood. I knew it. I even knew the name of the little collie who lived in the first farm. I wished him luck.

I returned directly to the road, and my boots were sucking in the mud when a truck came howling along toward me, and passed in a shower of muddy water. I glanced angrily after it, for the driver had almost hit me in his blind rush. As I watched, it swerved sharply to make the bend in the road and vanished from my view. I heard the sudden shrilling of brakes, then the roar of an accelerating motor -- and it was gone.

I didn't know then that, in its passing, it'd made an end to some of the best times that I had lived.

In the evening of that day I drove out along the road in company with a silent farmer who had come to fetch me. We stopped beyond the bend, and found him in the roadside ditch. The tracks that I'd followed ended here, nor would they ever lead my heart again.

It rained that night abd by the next dawn, even the tracks were gone, save by the cedar swap where a few little puddles dried quickly in the rising sun. There was nothing else, save that from a tangle of rustling brambles some tufts of fine white hair shredded quietly away in the early breeze and drifted down to lie among the leaves. The pact of timelessness between the two of us was ended, and I went from him into the darkening tunnel of the years.