wild raspberry bushes

wild raspberry bushes



by the creek, grow wherever birds drop their seeds (for birds love their sweetness),



adding colour to the muted fields of autumn



I came upon this brilliant mass of wild bushes, tansies, and late season goldenrods in the fields at the other end of my morning walk, past the old Pool 6 land.



I looked up and saw 2 deer, one with its antlers silhouetted against the sky, walking along the ridge above this tangle of wildflowers and berry bushes. The deer disappeared down the ridge. Deer love wild raspberry bushes. They eat the berries in summer and graze on the stalks and the leaves, in spite of their fuzziness. I saw there were trampled areas inside the bushes, like deer had laid down to sleep inside their fuzziness.



I know because I walked through a deer trail that weaved through the bushes with the dogs, trying to get a closer look at what kind of bird was that in the tree?



You can't get to the ridge, I tried, but it's not accessible to people, just deer that don't mind stepping through a deep boggy ditch filled with water and chocked with cattails. A ditch has been dug around this ridge. You can see the ridge at the far end of the bay. Tassu and Musti always head down this slope to slurp from Lake Superior. A paddle of 13 coots scooted away from the dogs. The ridge that you see on the other side belongs to the mound of earth that was trucked in to cover the creosote blob that was sucked out of the bottom of Lake Superior. Some of the creosote blob and contaminated earth was trucked away to other places for "treatment" and "disposal" (your community?) -- the blob was 8 football fields in size -- a vestige is still lying ghostly here under the earth, inside this ridge, waiting. They say the cattails and grasses and wild flowers will clean it.



Wild raspberry bushes are claiming the old railway tracks, too.