It is not quite four a.m. when I finally yield to an implacable restlessness and get out of bed. There is nothing to do now, I know from much experience, except to get outside and move around. So I make coffee, pull on my jeans and boots, grab a flannel shirt, and I walk toward the creek with Spike and Tonga. The moon is still visible, bright and clear just a few degrees above the horizon.
Stars glisten in crystalline profusion through the dry atmosphere of a mid-spring sky.
Indistinct but discernibly forming in the northwest are black, billowing cumulus, meaning the possibility of wind later, maybe rain. But for now it is comfortable enough. Predictably, the dogs head for their favorite sniffing- peeing place on the periphery of a small area in the yard that I ve allowed to fall wild. When I am with the dogs at night I become, or can become, aware of more than when I am alone, and aware of it in a different way. Subtleties in their postures and manners of focus often inform me of the proximity and movements of creatures I would ordinarily be oblivious of - a raccoon furtively traversing the trunk of a river birch that fell across the creek during the last flood, a cat hunting in the neighbor s hedge, a possum in the compost.