White Coat, Brown Coat
1When the aspen leaves turn gold and drop,
and each day ends a little sooner,
the hare in the thicket begins to change.
One white hair, then ten, then a hundred
creep along her ears and paws,
until she wears a patchy coat
of brown and white, like a field
where the first snow has not quite stuck.
2But this year the snow is slow to come.
Her coat turns white before the ground does,
and she sits in the brown leaves
as bright as a lantern in the dark.
She feels every eye in the forest upon her.
She hops from shadow to shadow,
waiting, waiting, for the sky to catch up.
3Then one gray night the snow arrives.
It falls and falls until morning,
and the whole hillside matches her at last.
Her wide back feet, furred like slippers,
carry her over the drifts
where heavier animals sink.
She nibbles twigs and willow bark
and rests in the hollows under the spruce.
4At dusk the lynx comes walking,
its big paws soft and silent.
The hare does not run.
She tucks her ears and holds so still
that she becomes a little hill of snow.
The lynx sniffs the cold air,
looks right past her,
and pads away into the trees.
5In spring the drifts sink and shrink under the warm sun.
Brown earth shows through in patches,
and so does she:
brown hairs push through the white
until she is a puzzle of both colors,
changing as the hillside changes,
melting, it seems, along with the snow.
6By summer she is brown again,
hidden among ferns and fallen logs,
with tiny brown babies tucked under the leaves.
And when the aspen leaves turn gold,
the first white hair will appear
along the tip of her ear,
and the year will begin its circle once more.