A changing light, a shifting wind, calls me out to meet more of this earth than I know. Habit stifles me. My round needs to be recharged. So I take a walk, like the oven bird, though not to gather any more food than my senses and my spirit need. There is a lobe of land a mile away, through the oaks, over the shore road, and across to sea level, called the Crow Pasture. It is bordered by a tidal inlet and marsh on one side and the sands of Cape Cod Bay on the other. It is covered with low, wind-topped growth, blueberry bushes, beach plums, stands of pitch pine, and stunted oak; and it is flushed with moving light and shadow, hovered over and hunted by great clouds. The Crow Pasture is without houses so far, and it is a bare recipient of high events, the range of storms, the distances that come in and declare themselves by wind or flight, the summer vaunting of the sun, the cold appeal of the moon. Narrow, rutted dirt roads lead into it and take you on. This land, once used for pasturing cows, now domesticated only by sparrows, robins, and chickadees, has final summer abundance in it. Locusts bound from dry land grasses with rattling wings. Green head flies buzz in savage haste. A yellow and black goldfinch flies over, bouncing along. There are ebony-beaded blackberries on the ground, and a few dark berries left on high bush blueberries. A stiff wind from the south shakes up the thickets and the wild indigo, a compact, light bouquet of a plant with cloverlike leaves and yellow pea flowers. Pointed cedars stir and writhe. The air rushes through the bayberries with their glossy leaves, and it sweeps down across the marshland ahead through purple and yellow grasses that plume and sway, off to the white sands beyond. Open land, wild air, lead ahead until salt water appears, the blue barrens that curve beyond sight. Stiff, stunted bushes are backed up at the edge of the marsh, hideaways for sparrows, then marsh rosemary, or sea lavender, shows in occasional clumps through the eddying stalks of grass. One area is thick with mosquitoes, sounding a low melody of harassment. In the bed of a ditch, dotted with holes made by fiddler crabs, are the tracks of a skunk. All that lives here permanently, not foraging like a skunk, or migratory like most of the birds, has to stand strong light, harsh winds, and salt spray, that dry, abrase, and burn. The marsh merges with the sand, back of low dunes covered with stiff, sharp-tipped beach grass and seaside goldenrod, thick stalked, with broad soft leaves, a succulent, related to cacti, made to hold and retain moisture. The beach shelves down from the dunes and meets the exposed tidal ground, ledges of dark peat which is pitted like volcanic rock, and very slippery to walk on. Beyond it at low tide the sand flats ease out, stretch and flow, with aisles and purple fingers of water rippling, writhing, and probing across them.