Tracking the elusive snowshoe hare can yield more than just frostbite.
A couple Sundays ago, at dusk, on a snowy hillside in a grove of lodgepole pines, I frostbit my toes. Technically, I probably only nipped them. But damn, it certainly felt like winter took a toothy bite, especially when I eased into a hot bath later that night. Whatever the diagnosis, the little piggies are sensitive now. Tender. They ache at the slightest touch. Can toes wince? Mine do.
Between December and May, on any given day of the week, somebody in gung-ho Crested Butte is shredding the gnar as aggressively as the gnar has ever been shredded. Obsessed splitboarders chase pillow drops in the backcountry. Amped snowmobilers braap their sleds on avalanche-prone slopes. Laughing drunken yahoos crush chairlift beers and mogul runs in quick succession (wash, rinse, repeat). My neighbors don’t discuss frozen appendages very often, but I suspect that’s because anything besides a true case of necrosis is unexceptional. Severe cold rarely keeps Crested Buttians indoors. Rather, it keeps folks charging and pumping the blood.
And therein lies the problem. My problem. On that recent Sunday, despite the dying light and the plunging temps and the sweat crystallizing in my thermal undies, I was standing perfectly, frigidly, foolishly still. In fact, I was making an extreme sport of standing still — leaning on my poles, squinting hard at a nearby drift, ignoring the dampness in my cross-country ski boots and the growing pain in my feet. The forest was silent save for a bossy voice in my head: Do not budge. Do not breathe. Become nobody, nothing, wallpaper, part of the scenery. Blend in. Disappear. You’re a freak for endurance, aren’t you? Well, this is the ultimate test. You gonna wuss out? After coming this far? After getting this close?
The voice quieted as the dull pink sky faded to gray. Maybe fifteen minutes passed, maybe thirty? Tough to estimate. Time went brittle, broke to pieces. Immersed in the moment, only the place and my suffering remained. Only the tense, boring, exciting game of waiting for an animal I’d been tracking all December — a snowshoe hare hidden before me, hidden in plain sight — to move.
***
Colorado naturalist Audrey Benedict describes the snowshoe hare, Lepus americanus, as the “undisputed master” of the winter woods. Amen, sister! The oversized hind feet are coated in thick fur, which enables superior flotation on soft powder. The pelage changes color in autumn, shifting from rusty brown to clean white (like the proverbial polar bear’s nose in a blizzard, the black ear tips and dark glinting eyes are the only giveaway).
Though the hare is a key player in the food chain, preyed on by fox, coyote, lynx, bobcat, great horned owl, goshawk, etc., its legendary reproductive drive — a female may have four litters of up to eight young (potentially 32 babies, or leverets), annually — allows populations to flourish across the continent. Peek into a conifer forest anywhere from Newfoundland to Alaska, from the Appalachians to the Southern Rockies, and you will see the distinct prints — an unmistakable signature in what certain trappers and hunters elegantly refer to as the White Book.
The snowshoe hare is Master indeed. And that makes me what exactly? Apprentice? Acolyte? Smitten admirer? President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer of the Lepus Americanus Fan Club? Though I occasionally seek vertical thrills alongside my noisy, buzzing Crested Butte pals, mostly I recreate solo, kicking and gliding on the valley floor. That is to say, I cross-country ski: early autumn to late spring, three to seven evenings a week. I don’t mean skating on groomers in a Spandex jumpsuit, dreaming of Olympic stardom and universal wax. I mean clicking into a pair of beater Rossignols, sneaking through town’s unplowed alleys, and losing myself in the intricate forests of the outskirts. In the trance of focus. In the curlicue wanderings and zigzag peregrinations of moose, mouse, ermine, squirrel, and, of course, the Master.
Losing myself, finding myself lost — that’s central to this hobby. When I was a child in Vermont, few pleasures compared to lift- service skiing at Sugarbush, Stowe, Bolton, and Jay Peak: facing my fear on bulletproof double-black-diamonds, building booters and hucking cliffs, exploring the web of interconnecting trails. But by my teenage years, under the influence of Thoreau, THC, and a number of rugged backpacking trips, I got interested in following less defined, cut- and-dried paths. Instead of a line laid out by the corporate office, by a uniquely human intelligence, how about a line provided by nature, like a river or tundra ridge? Instead of a known start and finish, an established Point A and Point B and Point C, how about a thread unspooling toward mystery? Experimenting with alternative routes became my passion. In my mid-twenties, I met a famous endurance athlete who glowed as he spoke of tracking migrating elephants in the Namib Desert. Yessir.
For me, snowshoe hares are small, fluffy, adorable elephants. They won’t lead you on an epic multi-week expedition (try a wolverine if you want to traverse half a dozen mountain ranges and gnaw carrion for breakfast), but they will lead you deeper and deeper — perhaps deeper than you can believe — into the local micro-wilds. If you let them. If you accept the invitation.
I don’t carry a phone while cross- country skiing, thus no Gaia app to measure my progress, but I suspect an average session with the hares packs three miles of travel into a mere three acres of habitat; such are the convolutions and contortions of a typical Lepus americanus route. The Master leaps from a buried boulder to a buried log to a buried beaver dam. The Master vanishes among subalpine firs and emerges at a meadow’s edge. The Master curves and swerves, jibs and bonks. She pauses, poops. She catches big air. Then a second track appears, then a third track, then a fourth track, and suddenly the White Book reads like a choose-your-own-adventure story. Left or right? Uphill or downhill? To the cross- hatched maze of willows or the tangled labyrinth of spruce? Mirroring a hare’s ten thousand hops is difficult, even technical. Ask my Rossignols about it and they will tell you stories of ledges, chutes, wicked face plants, sweet fatigue.
I ought to emphasize, in case it isn’t clear, that I’m only talking about following the prints. The actual animals are ridiculously elusive. In addition to being camouflaged, they are nocturnal, spending the bright, dangerous daylight hours in beds, or “forms,” under the protective cover of brush and deadfall. I have twice stumbled on individuals in their summer pelage while bushwhacking at dawn — a flash of fur, an astonishing quickness — but consistently struggled to steal a glimpse of one in its handsome winter coat. So that became my goal this past December. And that’s why a couple Sundays ago, at dusk, on a snowy hillside in a grove of lodgepole pines…
***
Robert Bateman, a Canadian artist who depicts wildlife with an almost photorealistic brushstroke, has a portrait of a snowshoe hare that I like very much — in part because the animal seems to be of a piece with its environment, simultaneously emerging from and receding into the snowy backdrop. Writes Bateman: “This painting presented a challenge. In order to make the animal stand out, the logical place to put it would have been in front of the dark vegetation, but I thought it would be more interesting to paint the hare as nature had intended it — white on white.”
Knee deep in powder, literally and figuratively frozen in place, I wasn’t thinking about Bateman’s painting so much as viscerally inhabiting it. The hare had bolted from its form at the sound of my grunting, oblivious approach. It had stopped fifty-odd feet away and magically become — WTF? — a drift. It had pulled me onto the canvas, into the frame. But whereas in Bateman’s work the Master is merely camouflaged, in this scene she was totally imperceptible. I was waiting, squinting, the day dimming.
I was squinting, waiting, icicles crusting over my mustache. My poor little piggies whimpered. The voice returned: Perseverance! Joyous agony! Hang in there, dude! Don’t you dare blink!
But enough was enough. Soon it would be too dark to know if I’d won the endurance contest, too cold to know if I was alive or merely cryogenically preserved. Who was I to compete with the Master? What impudence, what hubris. Secretly quite pleased with the decision, I gave in. Coughed. Raised a glove to wipe my raw, drippy nose. Shifted weight — blissfully — from my left leg to my right. And that was all it took to release the trigger. The spring-loaded hare launched into vivid visibility and, just as quickly, the safety of a greater distance.
She was here. She was gone. She was close, impossibly close — sprinting through the silent forest of my shivering mind.