Suddenly I noticed something at my feet: feathers, hundreds of them, lying on the bright, granular snow.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Afeathers.jpg)
Something had happened here. I looked around. There were big gray feathers, and smaller white ones, half-down. They were on and in the snow, some even half-caught in ice.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Afeathers2.jpg)
It was a wild scatter, not a gentle moulting. Something savage had occurred. I looked upstream along the riverbank's snow. A trail of animal prints led to the little feather field where I stood. Something had feasted on bird, probably gull, and left only the feathers behind.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Afeathers4.jpg)
I looked closer. Amidst the glaucous gray and white of ice and feathers were small spots of red, eye-catching as the red of berries in a late winter thicket.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Afeathers3.jpg)
I've spent months and months haunting the riverbank with my camera, documentarian of the death of weeds, lovingly capturing their decline, fearlessly recording their mowing-down, dessication, attenuation, uprooting, rot.
This, though, was different. Less metaphoric. Closer to home. I felt as if I were taking pictures at a crime scene.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Afeathers5.jpg)
This was a question of meat, not phloem. Blood, not chlorophyll.
![](http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/Anywhere%3ADesktop%20Folder%3Agullze.jpg)
But, of course, this was not a forensic matter. It was no more a murder than a sparrow eating a berry is a robbery, or the wind overturning a tree into the river is assault.
Then again maybe there was a certain culpability. The river's unnatural scrim of human detritus draws the seagulls here, lures them miles inland. It, like most places tainted by city, is part landfill: tasty, poisonous.
So there was a perp after all, I thought, uneasily. An accomplice. A conspirator.
It was the oldest denouement in the film noir book, the quintessential surprise ending, plot twist. I looked furtively around, and took off through the underbrush.
The law, the natural law, was hot on my trail.
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