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Image:  Digital photograph: Red Fox (New Brunswick)

My good friend Diane MacDonald is a marvellous photographer. Most weeks, we choose one of the trails on Pender Island, and meander along, pausing often to chat or take pictures of the beauty that surrounds us.  Last week, Diane told me about how, a day or two earlier, from her deck, she spotted a heron patiently hunting in the shallows. Nearby, a deer was grazing.  For a change, she said, neither heron nor deer took any notice of her; they just went on about their business, allowing her to get quite close.  She took photograph after photograph of the heron; then after some time, decided she had enough to work with, and turned to leave. Of course – just as she turned, her camera no longer at the ready, the heron took flight, its reflection vivid in the still water.  Diane’s lament: “If I had just waited one more minute I’d have had a great shot,” reminded me of my poem Shutter (from The Time Being), written about some of my own might-have-been photos during a trip back to New Brunswick some years ago. 

Shutter

I almost caught that blue-winged teal standing
with her wings wide open, then three blue-jays

fleeing, peanuts in their beaks.  I’m told
that mangy fox we watched cavorting

in the ditch beyond the covered bridge
(where we listened to deep echoes in the stillness

of old wood) dashed right behind us once
we’d turned away.  An osprey left its treetop

nest just before I had my camera
set; two bald eagles circled low

as we sped along the highway, past lupine
fields electrified in pink and blue.

All this and more is what I saw – and still
I called everything today a near miss.