Braiding Sweetgrass

mechanical motion across the road, dragging a thick tail in a
sinuous side-to-side wave behind it. When it stops in the circle of
my light, I reach out to touch its skin, blue-black, like night
congealed. The body is splotched with opaque yellow like drops of
paint on a wet surface, blurred at the edges. Its wedge-shaped
head swings from side to side, blunt snout with eyes so dark they
disappear into its face. By its size—about seven inches long—and
its swollen sides, I’d guess this is a female. I wonder what it feels
like to drag that tender skin—with a smooth, soft belly made for
sliding over wet leaves—across the asphalt.
I stoop to pick her up, circling my two fingers just behind her front
legs. There is surprisingly little resistance. It’s like picking up an
overripe banana: my fingertips sink into her body, cold and soft and
wet. I gently set her down on the shoulder and wipe my hands on
my pants. Without a backward glance, she lunges over the
embankment, down to the pond.
The females are the first to arrive. Heavy with eggs, they will
slide into the shallows and disappear among the decaying leaves on
the bottom. They wait, fecund and sluggish in the cold water, for
the males, who will make the same journey down from the hillsides
a day or two later.
They come out from under logs and across streams all pointed in
the same direction: the pool where they were born. Their route is
circuitous because they don’t have the ability to climb over
obstacles. They follow along the edges of any log or rock until it
ends and they are free to go forward, on to the pond. The natal
pond may be as much as half a mile from their wintering spot, and
yet they locate it unerringly. Salamanders have a guidance system
easily as complex as the “smart bombs” winding their way to
targets in Iraqi neighborhoods tonight. Without the benefit of