By John G. Funchion

Illustration by Nina Ritson

Along with the beauty of each welcomed sunrise, my daily morning three mile walk is often punctuated by sightings of fox, coyotes, deer, and elusive pileated woodpeckers, beavers, bears, a bobcat and an occasional pheasant.

Suffused in this splendid canvas of nature on Mountain Road is a family of crows awaiting my arrival and the cornucopia of scraps I feed them. Down the road, where Mountain Road crosses Westside Drive, a covey of robins with confused intentions fly about as aberrant reminders of spring.

Most interesting is the graceful cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum). It is a sleek, crested brown bird with a signature yellow band on its tail and red wingtips. Along with those oddball robins, they silently flock in undulating waves to feast upon winter’s reserve of leftover berries on the invasive buckthorn trees on Westside Drive.

One cold, snow-covered January morning, with the temperature around five degrees, a rare ice bow appeared over the Norfolk sky as the rising sun dissected prisms of ice crystals into a spectrum of glorious color. And there on the side of the road was a grounded cedar waxwing, quivering in the snow.

My impulse was to pick up the tiny bird and ask, “What’s wrong with my little friend?” As I did, it instinctively flew from my gloved hand to alight on a nearby branch. There it perched precariously among the glimmering snow puffs, its black eyes reflecting the bright morning sun.

I continued my walk up Westside Drive to the gate of the former Hutterite enclave and made my turn homeward. Lamentably, on my return, my friend was laying belly-up in the snow under the bush, stiff and lifeless, its ebony eyes fixed open.

Thoughts of my own mortality merged with wonder at the little bird’s sudden death. I plucked it out of its snowy coffin to study its tufted beauty as it seemed to stare back at me. Then, with the impulse of a child, I placed it in the pocket of my wool pants to bring it home to show my wife.

On my way, I stopped at the Corner Store for coffee. I showed the little bird to my morning cohorts; some were saddened, one was aghast, one laughed.

Putting the waxwing back in my pocket, I headed home and placed it on a paper towel on the kitchen counter and awaited my wife’s reaction: “Oh great, a dead bird on my counter!”

Finally, reflecting on the alpha and omega birth of that ice bow in the

heavens and the death of my feathered friend, I took it outside and gently placed it back in the snow, face up, among the maples, tulip and hemlock trees. There, in accordance with the lasting laws of nature, it remains.