On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes - Plot & Excerpts
(Henry David Thoreau) The Animals Among Us “A spill of spaghetti, cooked and sauced, formed a sunburst at my feet, attended to by a cluster of pigeons.” It was December twenty-first, the winter solstice. The business of being a pedestrian in the city had changed: any mosey that crept into people’s summer gait had been replaced by the determined fast stride of the winter walker. It was cold out, and I hunched my shoulders in a futile attempt to warm my ears and bully the chill away. But I was walking slowly enough to scan the tree branches and windowsills and fence tips for squirrels. For December twenty-first is the first day of the mating season for the eastern gray squirrel, apparently. Perhaps I would see some courtship, a typically pell-mell affair in which many males race after a single female squirrel—up tree trunks, along delicate branches, leaping across wide crevasses. It sounded like the rodent version of a great chase film, without the small European cars and tourist-crowded plazas.
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