I awoke to a cold crystalline new world on a recent morning, as a couple of inches of new snow had fallen during the night. By the time I took the dogs out for their morning walk, the sun had breached the Big Horns and the ice crystals suspended in the air twinkled and shown with incomparable brilliance and beauty.

Grateful for the absence of wind, I began my trek down the fence line we traverse on our daily sojourn. The dogs busied themselves with harvesting horse manure while I trudged along in my heavy-footed human way. Usually on our walks I keep my head up, because I am, by nature and training, a hunter.

That’s how you see what’s going on out there. All God’s creatures have been gifted with superior senses to those you and I possess, save our intellect. The whitetail fawn streaking out of cover before the dogs get there, the hawk hovering and plunging to the ground, talons extended as he reaches for a hapless vole, the irrigation district guys braving the cold as they bury another lateral, the ever-changing peaks shimmering dreamlike in the distance. If you’re just watching where you put your feet, you miss it all.

This morning, however, I kept my gaze toward the ground in front of me because a story always unfolds before you after a new snowfall. Every creature, great and small, leaves a signature: I was here.

For me, it is like a puzzle. A natural puzzle. The incredibly delicate tracks of a field mouse as he braves a truly dangerous world in search of a few weed seeds. A cottontail bunny doing likewise. Deer headed back to cover before dawn.

On this morning, I was treated to signs of a fox having visited our place during the night. At first he walked calmly along the fence before something, maybe the dogs, prompted him to break into a run. After a hundred yards, his tracks were joined by those of another fox. They meandered along together until they came upon a dead mallard hen laying upside down.

She’d been there for a couple of weeks. I knew, because the dogs had informed me of her presence some time ago, even though she was just a lump underneath the snow. Some people see with their noses.

The dead duck was no longer just a lump under the snow. She had been excavated and eaten. Expertly breasted out, all that remained were bones and feathers. The snow about the carcass was trampled with two sets of tracks leading off toward the river. I was reminded that nothing in nature is wasted. Nothing.

Someday soon, the fox will follow in the way of that mallard hen. An owl or a coyote or a hunter’s bullet will end its time on earth, for that’s the way of this life: It is temporal and fraught with risk, especially for a small predator with a propensity for getting crossways with you and me.

Foxes don’t die of old age in a nursing home. But for the time being, he’s still here, belly full, in a beautiful crystalline world.

And so are you and I. It is written. In the snow.

Almost makes you feel sorry for the snowbirds who run for Arizona at the first sign of trouble.