Melanistic Variant

Because I'm in the woods so frequently, I see more animals in the wild than most people. A larger sampling. If you include albino animals, which I do (I don't think field biologists do, they consider it a different sub-set) I've seen, over the years, a fair number of animals that weren't the correct color. White deer, black squirrels (coons and possums), yellow timber rattlesnakes. It's always such a shock, disconcerting. A black squirrel today. I'd seen a few of them on Mackletree, where the tree canopy overhangs the road and they use the overpass to avoid having to cross the road (at which they are very bad) but never on the ridge. I've seen black squirrels in three or four different states, so they must be fairly common. I knew a very beautiful albino Finnish woman once. She was so pale, that in the right light she disappeared. She always wore gauzy white, to enhance the disappearing act, but if you got very close to her skin, you could actually see the blood moving. I read something, earlier today, a different use of the word balaam, as being, in typography, those little filler pieces used to complete a column, that you actually kept set in type. They could be any damned thing, the cost of tea in China, a recipe for Mulligan Stew, the ferry schedule. Merely something to fill space. I was way up the Little Cimarron, just before I moved back east, 20 miles on a two-track, to a place I knew above the beaver ponds where the trout were all native Cut-Throat. Certainly over 10,000 feet. Spitting snow in July and August, but alpine meadows rampant in color. I'd made my usual crude camp, a fire, and a rough grill balanced on rocks, so I could use my cast iron skillet to fry fish, and I could make some coffee in the morning. I travel with a baby-food jar of bacon fat, salt and pepper. Usually a lemon and whatever hard loaf of bread I can find. I make a hoe-cake, with cornmeal, turtle eggs, and creek water, that isn't bad, if I don't have bread. False thunder, there's a phrase for that, brutum fulmen, a senseless thunderbolt, Pliny I think.