“In the wintertime, when all the leaves are brown and the wind blows, so chill,” — Steve Miller

With the sun beginning to drop out of the warm afternoon sky, shadows of tall, elderly white pine trees were lying across the cracked pavement, the faded broken yellow line that split the county road and the frozen surface of the sleeping lake.

Farther and farther the shadows were falling, grabbing and reaching, eventually, of course, they would have it all — not only the road and the lake, but the entire landscape.

I knew the daytime was dissolving and would soon disappear, but here I was, standing at the side of the road. I had made it out.

I had wrested myself free from the greedy clutches of the late Saturday afternoon sandman, the week’s exhaustion and a nagging malaise to get outside to see what I could see.

Like some way too-early groundhog, I had emerged from my musty den — blinking and scratching — to see my shadow late on a spring-like day with certainly more than six more weeks of winter to come.

Given the warm temperature and sunshine, I was surprised to find that my first observation of the lake was not evidence of melting, but rather, of beautiful blue-white snowdrifts stacked up in rows, one after another, in a long swirled wavy formation that ran across the frosted lake.

These were no doubt the glistening creations of strong, gusting winds a couple nights back that had cut across the open and wide expanse of this scenic northerly place. The tops of the drifts were rippled, like soft sands at the bottom of a shallow lake in the summertime.

I often think about how the adding and subtracting works of wind and water are so similar — no doubt brief flashbacks to my geomorphological grad school teachings.

Like that sand on the bottom of the lake, rippled with the undulating action of the lazy summer waves, the surface of the land, water and ice are like the bottom of a lake or stream themselves — formed and fashioned by the action of the overlying, rambling winds.

Contemplating that makes me feel like I’m some big old trout sitting on the gravel bottom of a rippling creek, looking up toward the sky, seeing a bent, refracted vision of the heavens above.

Is that a mirror? Is what a mirror? Inspection, detection, reflection.

A mirror is a negative space with a frame, and a place for your face, it reveals, what the rest of us see; it conceals, what you’d like it to be.

The sun is falling behind the hardwoods. It’s sunk low enough now, from where I am, it looks like someone standing in the woods with a great glimmering lantern.

I hear water dripping, hitting the ground. I look up for the source. A drop strikes my cheek and I feel its chill. It feels good. The water came from an armful of melting snow nested in the branches of a pine standing next to the road.

After a few more minutes, most of the snow slipped and cascaded down through the pine branches scattering to the ground.

On the other side of the road there is ample evidence of the wide wanderings of animals great and small. For centuries untold, people and animals have used ice to cross great water barriers.

From the ambitious timber wolves who found their way from the dark wooded wilds of Minnesota and Ontario to a royal archipelago out in the big lake, the ancient ancestors of the Bering Strait whose travels discovered a strange new world to the white-tailed deer, red fox, squirrels and rabbits that have used the frozen surface of this lake — ice has been important for transportation.

Mostly the attraction is newness and survival — new food, new and easier ways to get some place or new places to live or colonize. Animals, humans, it seems to be about the same for each.

Here on this lake, the tracks of animals diverge and converge scattered through the snow drifts, across the wide opening between the crooked shoreline and the gray rocks and bent and brown reeds and rushes at the edge of the water.

The voices of two young boys, out on an afternoon exploration around the horn, came bubbling across the ice to my ears from one of the small islands they never could have reached on foot at any other time of the year.

Ice anglers had also been here. The marks from plastic toboggans dragged by one or two souls zig and zag to a place farther offshore than I’d care to risk. There, a thin lens of frozen water covers a dark hole to the depths, while the jagged spoils from a toothy electric ice auger lie in piles atop the ice.

In the swamp along a creek leading into the lake, I’m kind of surprised to see the fresh wintry works of a beaver. A felled poplar was lying across the snow, tender branches from its upper reaches now readily available.

Just a foot or so away, I see the tell-tale spiked stump with gnaw marks up and down its sides. I imagine the terror of a tree standing with nowhere to go, seeing an approaching beaver.

It’s hard to guess how thick the ice is.

There are a couple of places where currents have broken through the ice to expose water from an inlet or two. The largest of these has tracks of a deer circled around the open water.

It didn’t appear the deer had gotten close enough to drink. Perhaps some instinct triggered the defenses of what I guessed had been a yearling, signaling that the ice was too thin to support its weight.

At another opening, the dark outline of a beaver or a muskrat slowly rose out of the water between the ice floes, like a submarine. Seeing me or my groundhog-like shadow along the lakeshore, it dove quickly and did not return.

At a marsh not far from the fallen poplar tree, tracks run strange patterns across the snow and ice. I can’t identify these. There are several imprints here I’d like to get a better look at, but the slushy bottoms of a couple of the tracks close to shore trigger my own instinct to not go any farther.

The marsh looks so much different during the wintertime with all the cattails and the green grasses of spring and summer long since fallen. For the first time, I notice there’s a couple of strands of barbed wire strung between green metal posts about halfway across the turtle sunning grounds.

This is significant for me because I had visited this place many times over the past few months and never saw it. The farther out into the marsh, the farther the posts sink.

It’s now clear to me, this fence was likely once high standing but was submerged when a dirt road here was pushed through the area, backing up a small creek along its side to form this pond.

The tall trees around the lake are good vantage points for eagles, hawks and owls, hungry they sit waiting for those small furry creatures venturing out onto the open space of the frozen lake, perhaps for the first and last time.

It’s getting cold enough now to need a real jacket instead of this old padded flannel. The evening star is shining, along with a few of the twinkling starry-eyed beauties in her court. I could use something to eat.

I make my way slowly around the big corner in the road, past the wishing place and the houses with their holiday lights outside, warm lights burning inside.

Two different worlds — those of humankind and nature — and yet the same, existing side-by-side, intertwined and connected, sinking or swimming we’re all on the ice together.

EDITOR’S NOTE: John Pepin is the deputy public information officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula. Send correspondence to pepinj@michigan.gov or 1990 U.S. 41 South, Marquette, MI 49855.